The Unassuming Economist

Interesting paper by Chris Papageorgiou , Fidel Perez-Sebastian and Nikola Spatafora:

“We explore the contribution of product-quality upgrading to the export performance of six fast-growing Asian economies: China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand. We focus on measuring the impact of quality upgrading on the changes in these countries’ sectoral export shares during 1970–2010. We build a multisector Ricardian trade model which allows for changes in product quality, and calibrate it to generate predictions about export volumes. Unlike previous literature, our approach allows estimation without employing domestic production data. Our results point to quality upgrading being a key driver of export shares.”

From a new working paper by Zoe Cullen (Harvard University) and Ricardo Perez-Truglia (UCLA):

“The old boys’ club refers to the alleged advantage that male employees have over their female counterparts in interacting with powerful men. For example, male employees may schmooze with their managers in ways that female employees cannot. We study this phenomenon using data from a large financial institution. We use an event study analysis of manager rotation to estimate the causal effect of managers’ gender on their employees’ career progression. We find that when male employees are assigned to male managers, they are promoted faster in the following years than they would have been if they were assigned to female managers. Female employees, on the contrary, have the same career progression regardless of the manager’s gender. These differences in career progression cannot be explained by differences in effort or output. This male-to-male advantage can explain a third of the gender gap in promotions. Moreover, we provide suggestive evidence that these manager effects are due to socialization between male employees and male managers. We show that these manager effects are present only if the employee works in close proximity to the manager. We use survey data to show that, after transitioning to a male manager, male employees spend more time with their managers. Finally, we study a shock to socialization within males, based on the anecdotal evidence that employees who smoke tend to spend more time together. We find that when male employees who smoke switch to male managers who smoke, they spend more of their breaks with their managers and are promoted faster in the following years. Moreover, the effects of these smoking manager switches are similar in timing and magnitude to the effects of the gender manager switches.”

On cross-country:

• Q3 2019: The global house price boom continues strong, especially in Europe, but sharp slowdown in North America, the Middle East and some parts of Asia-Pacific – Global Property Guide
• Prime Global Cities Index Q3 2019 – Knight Frank

On the US:

• Bold Predictions for 2020: Shrinking Homes and a More Stable Market – Zillow
• These Housing Markets Could Heat Up (Podcast) – Bloomberg
• Fix California’s Housing Crisis, Activists Say. But Which One? – Citylab
• A Modest Proposal: How Even Minimal Densification Could Yield Millions of New Homes – Zillow
• Mapping America’s Metropolitan Growth: Islands of Density in a Sea of No Growth – Zillow
• Home Purchase Sentiment Rebounds in November, Re-Approaches Survey High – FannieMae
• Home Equity in Retirement – Philadelphia Fed
• Owner-Occupancy Fraud and Mortgage Performance – Philadelphia Fed
• Opinion: To solve the problem of unaffordable entry-level housing, abolish single-family zoning – MarketWatch
• Vouchers can help the poor find homes. But landlords often won’t accept them. – VOX
• Fannie and Freddie Need Fixing — Urgently: A Response to Joe Nocera – Cato Liberty
• Release: New Carpenter Index developed by AEI Housing Center – American Enterprise Institute
• “Decommodifying” Housing and Other Magical Thinking – E21
• Tenants are winners in Manhattan’s oversupplied luxury home market – Financial Times

On other countries:

• [China] China’s Housing Market Goes the WeWork Way—and Thousands Get Evicted – Wall Street Journal
• [Israel] Does Location Matter? Evidence on Differential Mortgage Pricing in Israel – Bank of Israel
• [Lithuania] Lithuania’s modest house prices increase – Global Property Guide
• [Netherlands] Netherlands’ house price growth slowly decreasing – Global Property Guide
• [Norway] Norway’s financial stability as risk from household debt, property prices -regulator – Reuters

*Please note that Housing View will be on hiatus for the next three weeks. 

As 2019 draws to a close, below is our list of the top ten blogs of the year.

• Housing Market in Sweden
• Housing View – January 3, 2019 [2019 AEA Annual Meeting Special Edition]
• Paul Cheshire on Urban Economics 
• 2019 AEA’s papers on Inequality
• Housing Market in Malta
• 2019 AEA’s papers on Energy and Climate Change 
• Housing Market in Finland 
• Understanding Housing Supply: Views from Jenny Schuetz 
• Inequality of Opportunity, Inequality of Income and Economic Growth 
• Daniel Hamermesh: How Do People Spend Time?

Photo by Colton Duke

From Conversable Economist:

“Paul Volcker, who was chair of the Federal Reserve from August 1979 to August 1987.has died. He is generally credited, or in some cases blamed, for the set of monetary policies which both ended the inflationary period of the 1970s but also brought on the very deep double-dip recessions of 1980 and 1981-2. The New York Times obituary is here.

For an overview of those times and how Volcker perceived the choices he was facing, a useful starting point is “An Interview with Paul Volcker,” conducted by Martin Feldstein, which appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Here’s a flavor:

It made a profound impression on me, if nobody else, that Arthur Burns titled his valedictory speech “The Anguish of Central Banking” (Burns 1979). That was a long lament about how, in the economic and political setting of the times, the Federal Reserve, and by extension presumably any central bank, could not exercise enough eserve, and by extension presumably any central bank, could not exercise enough restraint to keep inflation under control. It was a pretty sad story. If you were going to follow that line, you were going to give up, I  guess. I didn’t think you could give up.  If I was in that job, that was the challenge as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. You inherit a certain challenge …

The favorite word at the time, which was very popular within the Federal Reserve, but I think popular in the academic community generally, was “gradualism.” I don’t quite remember them saying, “Don’t bring it down at all.”But instead, it was “Take it easy. It will be a job of, I don’t know, years, decades, whatever, and you can do it without hurting the economy.” I never thought that was realistic. The inflationary process itself brought so many dislocations, and stresses and strains that you were going to have a recession sooner or later.”

Continue reading here.