Calm Down about Common Ownership

Calm Down about Common Ownership” is the title of an article Thom Lambert and I published in the latest (Fall 2018) issue of Regulation. The article is a condensed version of our full paper, “The Case for Doing Nothing About Common Ownership of Small Stakes in Competing Firms,” which I posted about in May.

While I’ve not been posting here much in the past few months, Thom and I have written a series of blog posts at Truth On The Market about the perceived problem of common ownership (specifically by institutional investors) across competing firms, and the problems both with the alleged antitrust harms and the proposed “fixes”. Those posts both summarize and expand upon some of the arguments and issues in our paper. To make it easier to find them, I’ve listed them below in chronological–and logical–order:

This issue of common ownership and whether antitrust authorities should deal with it is currently a fairly hot topic. In fact, today the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is opening up its Hearings on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century. which include the topic of common ownership. Thom and I submitted comments in advance of the hearing based on our paper. Next week I’ll attend a debate forum on the issue with other scholars (including some aggressive pro-enforcement folks we take to task in our paper), regulators, and members of the investment community. It should be an interesting time.

Isn’t there a Chinese curse about that?

Handbook of the Economics of Wine

Today I received my copy of Volume 2 of the Handbook of the Economics of Wine, edited by Orley Ashenfelter, Olivier Gergaud, Karl Storchmann and William Ziemba. Volume 2 contains chapters (essay, papers) regarding reputation, regulation, and market organization issues in the global wine industry. It includes a paper I published with a former MS/JD student, Gina Riekhof, on “Politics, Economics, and the Regulation of Direct Interstate Shipping in the Wine Industry“, which originally appeared in the May 2005 issue of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

The Handbook of the Economics of Wine is actually Volume 6 of the “World Scientific Handbook in Financial Economics Series”, and includes two volumes of its own. Volume 1, a copy of which I did not receive, is focused on issues of price, financing, and expert opinions. Not sure I’m going to shell out the cost to have Volume 1 on the shelf. But it does look like an interesting collection of articles. The Handbook has been a long time in the making. It’s nice to see it finally in print. Nice work, editors all.

To “Nudge” or Not To “Nudge”

Congratulations to Alessandro Lizzeri and Leeat Yariv for receiving the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics “2018 AEJ Best Paper” award for their paper titled “Collective Self-Enforcement.” in which they model the desirability of various forms of ‘collective action’ in the form of government intervention to influence individuals’ self-control decisions. The abstract of the paper reads:

Behavioral economics presents a “paternalistic” rationale for a benevolent government’s intervention. We consider an economy where the only “distortion” is agents’ time-inconsistency. We study the desirability of various forms of collective action, ones pertaining to costly commitment and ones pertaining to the timing of consumption, when government decisions respond to voters’ preferences via the political process. Three messages emerge. First, welfare is highest under either full centralization or laissez-faire. Second, introducing collective action only on consumption decisions yields no commitment. Last, individuals’ relative preferences for commitment may reverse depending on whether future consumption decisions are centralized or not.

Lizzeri, Alessandro, and Leeat Yariv. 2017. “Collective Self-Control.” American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 9 (3): 213-44. DOI: 10.1257/mic.20150325

What Do (Academic) Economists Value?

Which do economists consider most important in evaluating one another? The quality of the journals in which they publish, or the number of citations of the articles they have written?

It turns out, according to a recent study by John Gibson, David. L. Anderson and John Tressler coming out in Economic Inquiry, that economists seem to place more value on the prestige of the journal than whether or not anyone cites–or even reads–the research. At least among top-ranked economics departments. Or, at the top-ranked economics departments in the University of California system, but there’s little reason to think that the behavior of economists across the UC system is not representative of the profession as a whole in this regard. Their abstract reads:

Research quality can be evaluated from citations or from the prestige of journals publishing the research. We relate salary of tenured University of California (UC) economists to their lifetime publications of 5,500 articles and to the 140,000 citations to these articles. Citations hardly affect salary, especially in top-ranked UC departments where impacts of citations are less than one-tenth those of journals. In lower ranked departments, and when journal quality is less comprehensively measured, effects of citations on salary increase. If journal quality is just measured by counting articles in journal tiers, apparent effects of citations are overstated.

This is an interesting–and to my mind, sad–result. As the authors explain in their paper, there are many reasons why citations would be a more meaningful measure of the quality and impact of a particular paper than would be the journal in which it is published. After all, the decision to publish is based on the opinions of a handful (at most) of individuals (i.e., the editor and a few reviewers picked by the editor). Citations, on the other hand, reflect the opinion of the broader academic community.

And in terms of relevance to anything of value, one might also argue that citations are a much better metric of the “So What?” question. If no one cites a paper, it suggests either no one read it or no one found the ideas or results it contained to be worth mentioning in the market of ideas or future research. Which begs the question of whether it is really all that important or meaningful, whether within academia or, heaven forbid, more broadly? And if not meaningful, then what is the basis of “quality”?

The authors also identify another wrinkle. Among lower ranked economics departments, journal quality is less important and citations tend to be given more weight. The authors, citing Liebowitz (2014) , suggest this may be because “faculty at lower ranked schools may rely on easily available proxies, such as counts of articles or of citations, rather than making their own determination based on reading the articles when they have to evaluate a research record in order to make a labor market decision.” This may be because faculty at lower ranked programs are more likely to have published in lower ranked journals–and there is no general consensus on relative journal quality rankings beyond the top few journals. Hence the appeal and use of such metrics as Impact Factors

I’d like to think there’s something more going on. Rather than simply using citations as a low-cost way of evaluating research quality, perhaps lower ranked programs, which tend to be more teaching-focused, actually value  the citations in and of themselves as an indication that the work actually has meaningful relevance and impact.

One would expect there to be some correlation between citations and the quality of journal in which an article appears. The traditionally more highly ranked journals likely have larger readership, which should translate into more citations. One metric of journal quality–its impact factor–is based on the number of citations it receives. But that is based on the average for the journal as a whole, not any one specific article. As illustrated here, it’s quite likely that a small percentage of articles in a given journal generate a substantial proportion of its citations, meaning the journal’s quality metric may be a rather poor proxy for any given article’s impact.

When push comes to shove, however, Gibson et al. suggest that what matters most to academic economists–especially those at the more prestigious departments–is not necessarily how much influence or relevance a particular paper has for shaping the intellectual debate, but whether it appears with a more prestigious cover.

That says something about the profession, I think. And perhaps not something good.

 

 

 

Craft Beer in the US: History, Stats and Geography

Ken Elzinga (Virginia) and Carol and Victor Tremblay (Oregon State) have a paper in the latest Journal of Wine Economics titled “Craft Beer in the United States: History, Statistics and Geography.” The paper provides a great overview of the history of the craft brew industry as well as some interesting analysis on the geographic development of the industry. The history section seems to draw heavily on Tom Aticelli’s 2013 book The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution, but provides a much more concise summary. And paired with the statistical overview of the beer industry in general and the empirical analysis of the craft brew industry that follows, this paper offers a nice, short primer for anyone interested in the history (and economics) of the craft brew industry in the US. The paper’s abstract follows:

We provide a mini-history of the craft beer segment of the U.S. brewing industry with particular emphasis on producer-entrepreneurs but also other pioneers involved in the promotion and marketing of craft beer who made contributions to brewing it. In contrast to the more commodity-like lager beer produced by the macrobrewers in the United States, the output of the craft segment more closely resembles the product differentiation and fragmentation in the wine industry. We develop a database that tracks the rise of craft brewing using various statistical measures of output, number of producers, concentration within the segment, and compares output with that of the macro and import segment of the industry. Integrating our database into Geographic Information Systems software enables us to map the spread of the craft beer segment from its taproot in San Francisco across the United States. Finally, we use regression analysis to explore variables influencing the entrants and craft beer production at the state level from 1980 to 2012. We use Tobit estimation for production and negative binomial estimation for the number of brewers. We also analyze whether strategic effects (e.g., locating near competing beer producers) explain the location choices of craft beer producers.

Do Medical Marijuana Laws Increase Hard-Drug Use?

According to a recent study by Yu-Wei Luke Chu in the Journal of Law & Economics, the answer is not just “No,” but that medical marijuana laws may actually decrease heroin use as consumers substitute the legal marijuana for heroin. Below is the abstract:

Medical marijuana laws generate significant debate regarding drug policy. For instance, if marijuana is a complement to hard drugs, then these laws would increase the usage not only of marijuana but also of hard drugs. In this paper I study empirically the effects of medical marijuana laws by analyzing data on drug arrests and treatment admissions. I find that medical marijuana laws increase these proxies for marijuana consumption by around 10–15 percent. However, there is no evidence that cocaine and heroin usage increases. From the arrest data, the estimates indicate a 0–15 percent decrease in possession arrests for cocaine and heroin combined. From the treatment data, the estimates show a 20 percent decrease in admissions for heroin-related treatment, although there is no significant effect for cocaine-related treatment. These results suggest that marijuana may be a substitute for heroin, but it is not strongly correlated with cocaine.

Thursday's Interesting Reads

A couple of interesting articles came across my screen today.

The first, by Alex Tabarrock over at Marginal Revolution, corrects a popular misconception about the relative bargaining power of workers. He points out the problems (both conceptually and factually) in framing employment issues as “firm versus worker,” which focuses on the threat of worker unemployment. He also shares a nice chart from the St. Louis Federal Reserve illustrating how this perception of employers having control over employment relationships is quite incorrect. One of my favorite lines/points:Buyers don’t compete against sellers, buyers compete against other buyers (and sellers compete against other sellers). See how that’s important in this context.

The second, by Andrew Flowers at FiveThirtyEight Economics, reports on a recent study by Montazerhodjat and Lo (MIT) that argues how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should change its one-size-fits-all approach for approving drugs to take into account the opportunity cost of making the wrong decision. This idea isn’t at all new to economists. Currently, the FDA uses the same standard for all drugs, regardless the severity of the consequences of making the wrong decision (in the trade-off between Type 1 and Type 2 errors). Montazerhodjat and Lo’s study (available here) is pretty technical, but Flowers’ piece does a great job of summarizing the economics and the results in a much more lay reader-friendly way.

Happy reading!