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We quantify the causal impact of human mobility restrictions, particularly the lockdown of the city of Wuhan on January 23, 2020, on the containment and delay of the spread of the Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV). We employ a set of difference-in-differences (DID) estimations to disentangle the lockdown effect on human mobility reductions from other confounding effects […] The post A new NBER paper on the Wuhan lockdown appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Correlation ain’t causation, but nonetheless it is worth looking at correlation: Via Daniel Wilson.  And here is a story about defiant Iranians. The post European fatality rates and lawfulness appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Security measures that deter crime may unwittingly displace it to neighboring areas, but evidence of displacement is scarce. We exploit precise information on the timing and locations of all Italian bank robberies and security guard hirings/firings over a decade to estimate deterrence and displacement effects of guards. A guard lowers the likelihood a bank is […] The post When defense is not a public good appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Russ Roberts defends Milton Friedman (and many others, implicitly), excerpt: What about spending for public schools? Has that been reduced in this allegedly draconian neoliberal era? In 1960, per pupil expenditure for elementary and high school students was just under $4000. In 1980, when the neoliberal ideology allegedly began its ascendance, it was a little […] The post The economist as scapegoat appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Following the collapse of the communist regime in 1989, the number of births halved in East Germany. These cohorts became markedly more likely to be arrested as they grew up in reunified Germany. This is observed for both genders and all offence types. Here is the full article by Arnauld Chevalier and Olivier Marie, the […] The post Model this East German crime appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

We study the effects that two of the largest gangs in Latin America, MS-13 and 18th Street, have on economic development in El Salvador. We exploit the fact that the emergence of gangs in El Salvador was in part the consequence of an exogenous shift in US immigration policy that led to the deportation of […] The post Gangs really matter appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

That is the title of a new paper by Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga.  This piece goes considerably beyond previous research by having a more explicit model of both urban-rural interactions, and also possible congestion costs arising from more YIMBY.  Here are a few results of the paper: 1. If you restricted New York City […] The post Urban growth and its aggregate implications appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Check out the new NBER paper by Joseph Grourko, Jonathan Hartley, and Jacob Krimmel: We report results from a new survey of local residential land use regulatory regimes for over 2,450 primarily suburban communities across the U.S. The most highly regulated markets are on the two coasts, with the San Francisco and New York City […] The post There is now a NIMBY index appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Alon Levy has a good deck based on data he collected covering 205 projects in 40 countries on why subway costs are so expensive in the United States compared to much of the rest of the world. One of the points he makes is that a significant fraction of cost varies across countries which means […] The post Why Don’t We Know More About the Subway Cost Disease? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

In the past 40 years, a large number of children have been abandoned by their families or have been abducted in China. We argue that the implementation of the one-child policy has significantly increased both child abandonment and child abduction and that, furthermore, the cultural preference for sons in China has shaped unique gender-based patterns […] The post The one-child policy and Chinese child trafficking appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

A recent study of opioid-related deaths in Massachusetts underlines this crucial point, finding that prescription analgesics were detected without heroin or fentanyl in less than 17 percent of the cases. Furthermore, decedents had prescriptions for the opioids that showed up in toxicology tests just 1.3 percent of the time. Alexander Walley, an associate professor of […] The post Opioid deaths are not mainly about prescription opioids appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The racial integration of the US Army during the Korean War (1950-1953) is one of the largest and swiftest desegregation episodes in American history. This paper argues that racial integration improved white survival rates at the expense of blacks, and resulted in less anti-black prejudice among white veterans decades after the war. Using a novel […] The post The racial integration of the Korean War appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

We show that Harvard encourages applications from many students who effectively have no chance of being admitted, and that this is particularly true for African Americans. Here is the whole abstract, by Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler, and Tyler Ransom: Over the past 20 years, elite colleges in the US have seen dramatic increases in applications. […] The post Harvard sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

In the United States, elected district attorneys’ offices prosecute over 85% of all felony cases, but we know little about their effect on local criminal justice outcomes. Using a newly-collected dataset of district attorney elections, I show that Republican district attorneys lead to a 18-21% increase in new prison admissions in the two years following […] The post The effect of district attourneys on criminal justice outcomes appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The Impact of the Affordable Care Act: Evidence from California’s Hospital Sector (with Mark Duggan and Atul Gupta) R&R, AEJ: Economic Policy The Affordable Care Act (ACA) authorized the largest expansion of public health insurance in the U.S. since the mid-1960s. We exploit ACA-induced changes in the discontinuity in coverage at age 65 using a regression […] The post The impact of the Affordable Care Act appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

It is not obviously a winner policy, at least not from the point of view of boosting women’s labor market opportunities.  In fact it seems to harm them: This paper uses IRS tax data to evaluate the short- and long-term effects of California’s 2004 Paid Family Leave Act (PFLA) on women’s careers. Our research design […] The post The Long-Term Effects of California’s 2004 Paid Family Leave Act on Women’s Careers appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Event study estimates suggest that cartel presence increases substantially after 2010 in municipalities well suited to grow opium poppy. Homicide rates increase along with the number of active cartels per municipality, with higher increases when a second, third, fourth and fifth cartel become active in the territory. These results suggest that some of the increase […] The post The Mexican drug war and its intensification appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Now Mercatus has completed an analysis of state-level regulation. State RegData 1.0 analyzes the administrative codes of 46 states plus the District of Columbia, and the results are informative. The average state has 131,000 restrictive terms and about 9 million words in its code, which would require roughly twelve work weeks to read at a normal reading […] The post Ranking states by their degree of regulation appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.