APRIL 15 2016

Lawrence Summers, Washington Post: What’s behind the revolt against global integration? The core of the revolt against global integration, though, is not ignorance. It is a sense — unfortunately not wholly unwarranted — that it is a project being carried out by elites for elites, with little consideration for the interests of ordinary people. They see the globalization agenda as being set by large companies that successfully play one country against another. They read the revelations in the Panama Papers and conclude that globalization offers a fortunate few opportunities to avoid taxes and regulations that are not available to everyone else. And they see the kind of disintegration that accompanies global integration as local communities suffer when major employers lose out to foreign competitors.

Peter Dizikes, MIT News: How network effects hurt economies. “Relatively small shocks can become magnified and then become shocks you have to contend with [on a large scale],” says MIT economist Daron Acemoglu. Study reveals how woes in one industry can harm others, too. The findings run counter to “real business cycle theory,” which became popular in the 1970s and holds that smaller, industry-specific effects tend to get swamped by larger, economy-wide trends. More precisely, Acemoglu and his colleagues have found cases where industry-specific problems lead to six-fold declines in production across the U.S. economy as a whole. For example, for every dollar of value-added growth lost in the manufacturing industries because of competition from China, six dollars of value-added growth were lost in the U.S. economy as a whole.

Roland G. Fryer, Jr, NBER: The Production of Human Capital in Developed Countries: Evidence from 196 Randomized Field Experiments. Randomized field experiments designed to better understand the production of human capital have increased exponentially over the past several decades.  This chapter summarizes what we have learned about various partial derivatives of the human capital production function, what important partial derivatives are left to be estimated, and what - together - our collective efforts have taught us about how to produce human capital in developed countries.  The chapter concludes with a back of the envelope simulation of how much of the racial wage gap in America might be accounted for if human capital policy focused on best practices gleaned from randomized field experiments.

Simen Markussen, Knut Roed, IZA: The Market for Paid Sick Leave. In many countries, general practitioners (GPs) are assigned the task of controlling the validity of their own patients' insurance claims. At the same time, they operate in a market where patients are customers free to choose their GP. Are these roles compatible? Can we trust that the gatekeeping decisions are untainted by private economic interests? Based on administrative registers from Norway with records on sick pay certification and GP-patient relationships, we present evidence to the contrary: GPs are more lenient gatekeepers the more competitive is the physician market, and a reputation for lenient gatekeeping increases the demand for their services.

Raj Chetty, JAMA: The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States. In the United States between 2001 and 2014, higher income was associated with greater longevity, and differences in life expectancy across income groups increased over time. However, the association between life expectancy and income varied substantially across areas; differences in longevity across income groups decreased in some areas and increased in others. The differences in life expectancy were correlated with health behaviors and local area characteristics.

Noah Smith, Bloombergs: Decline of the U.S. Middle Class. The percentages of Americans who consider themselves working class has stayed relatively stable. But the self-identified middle class has plunged by about 10 percentage points, matched by an even larger increase in the percentage of Americans who label themselves lower class. The self-identified lower class should probably be included in the working class that gets discussed in articles about Trump and Sanders.

Osea Giuntella, Fabrizio Mazzonna, IZA: If You Don't Snooze You Lose: Evidence on Health and Weight. Most economic models consider sleeping as a pre-determined and homogeneous constraint on individuals' time allocation neglecting its potential effects on health and human capital. Several medical studies provide evidence of important associations between sleep deprivation and health outcomes suggesting a large impact on health care systems and individual productivity. Yet, there is little causal analysis of the effects of sleep duration. This paper uses a spatial regression discontinuity design to identify the effects of sleep on health status, weight, and cognitive abilities. Our results suggest that delaying morning work schedules and school start times may have non-negligible effects on Health.

Axel Mie, Maria Wivstad, SLU (2015): Organic Food – food quality and potential health effects. A review of current knowledge, and a discussion of uncertainties. In this report, we try to approach the question “Is organic food healthier than conventional food?” from a scientific perspective. We can conclude that science does not provide a clear answer to this question. A small number of animal studies and epidemiological studies on health effects from the consumption of organic vs. conventional feed/food have been performed. These studies indicate that the production system of the food has some influence on the immune system of the consuming animal or human. However, such effects are not easily interpreted as positive or negative for health.