Here’s the abstract of a new working paper by Maxim Pinkovskiy, Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Kasey Chatterji-Len, and William Nober (emphasis added): (HT David Levey)
Household surveys suffer from persistent and growing underreporting. We propose a novel procedure to adjust reported survey incomes for underreporting by estimating a model of misreporting whose main parameter of interest is the elasticity of regional national accounts income to regional survey income, which is closely related to the elasticity of underreporting with respect to income. We find this elasticity to be substantial but roughly constant over time, implying a large but relatively constant correction to survey-derived inequality estimates. Underreporting of income by the bottom 50% of the world income distribution has become particularly important in recent decades. We reconfirm the findings of the literature that global poverty and inequality have declined dramatically between 1980 and 2019. Finally, we find that within-country inequality is falling on average, and has been largely constant since the 1990s.
Peter Earle: “Wendy’s Won’t Use Dynamic Pricing – But Should They?”
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Robert Bork, Jr., warns of the dangers of ESG. A slice:
This dynamic is why the ESG movement is increasingly perceived not merely as a social movement but as a cartel. In a 2022 letter to BlackRock’s Larry Fink, 19 state attorneys general questioned the effect on fiduciary responsibility when big asset managers work in tandem with nongovernmental organizations and proxy advisers to restrict oil and gas production. The attorneys general asserted that ESG investors violate the Sherman Act, the nation’s foundational antitrust law, by engaging in a “restraint of trade.” This has manifested in the environmental arena, when asset managers have made huge investments in oil and gas while seeking to restrict the supply of oil and gas.
Joakim Book reports on the beneficial impact on electricity markets of Bitcoin. A slice:
Bitcoin is an awesome monetary technology, revolutionizing the world of money and assets and savings one skeptic at a time. In its wake, we find all sorts of beneficial second-order effects — improving the electricity grid and vacuuming up stranded worldwide energy just being the latest one. “Bitcoin miners are the economically perfect consumers of electricity,” concludes Lee Bratcher for Bitcoin Magazine, “their consistent consumption incentivizes the buildout of additional generation.”
Rachel Lomasky takes “a long view on artificial intelligence.”
Sarah Knapton: “Ministers failed to consider long-term pain of lockdown, say scientists.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
