Pay patients, save money

Plant Money has another episode that is making me re-think my opposition to government subsidies for radio HT:  Jim F

REPOST: Esther Duflo: using randomized controlled trials to fight poverty

Why businesses don't do this more frequently is beyond me.

M-PESA Breaks Down Regulatory Entry Barriers

A nice story by 60 minutes demonstrates the value of mobile money. What large corporations are jockeying to roll out in the US, Kenya has been doing for years with the most bear bones of mobile technologies. Users are able to make millions of micro-transactions per day over the mobile network using M-PESA. There are heart warming vignettes about the various ways  this benefits consumers. But the best part of the story for me was the erosion of entry barriers (around the 11:00 minute mark). The CEO of the mobile carrier explains:

Actually, when M-PESA started, Kenya's commercial banks implored the government to impose regulations to impede its development, but the government decided to take a hands-off approach, which is pretty unusual.

But other jurisdictions have taken notice.

The most effective barrier for the success of mobile money around the world is the banking lobby. The banking lobby in most parts of the world is a very strong lobby. And banks have looked at what's happened in Kenya and have decided that they don't want to see that happening in their own countries. 

But for the courage of some Kenyan government official, this may never have gotten off the ground.

Safety breeds risk

Can financial crises and other disasters be prevented? What was the role of the Federal Reserve, regulation, and risk in past crises? In the pursuit of safety from disaster, are we creating the conditions for the next one? Greg Ip, author of Foolproof, joined a panel of experts to discuss the themes of his new book at the Mercatus Center.

What is GDP?

Our friends at MR University have developed an online macro course with good, free content

Course Outline

1 GDP

• What is Gross Domestic Product (GDP)?
• Nominal vs. Real GDP
• Real GDP Per Capita and the Standard of Living
• Splitting GDP

2 The Wealth of Nations and Economic Growth

3 Growth, Capital Accumulation, and the Economics of Ideas

4 Savings, Investment, and the Financial System

5 Unemployment and Labor Force Participation

6 Inflation and Quantity Theory

7 Business Fluctuations

8 Transmission and Amplification

9 The Federal Reserve

10 Monetary Policy

11 Fiscal Policy

Running an art auction

Art is a textbook example of the advantages of an auction over simple posted price: an auction awards the art to the highest value bidder, and sets a price. Competition between the auction houses has taken the form of price guarantees:

Christie’s agreed to give the seller of “Four Marilyns,” Turkish financier Kemal Cingillioglu, a $40 million house guarantee, which means the house promised to pay him up to $40 million no matter how the silkscreen fared. Since it sold for less [only $32 million], the house could now need to pay him the difference. Christie’s declined to discuss the terms of the deal.

HT: Chris

Make the rules or your rivals will: erecting barriers to entry

HT: Sohil

REPOST: the Real meaning of Thanksgiving

What they don't tell you about Thanksgiving in school

Peter Klein gives us a more complete story of the first Thanksgiving:

Faced with potential starvation in the spring of 1623, the colony decided to implement a new economic system. Every family was assigned a private parcel of land. They could then keep all they grew for themselves, but now they alone were responsible for feeding themselves. While not a complete private property system, the move away from communal ownership had dramatic results.

This year I am giving thanks for private property.

Does life insurance cause suicide?

Insurance companies anticipate this kind of moral hazard, and typically include an exception for death by suicide.  However, the exception lasts only a few years, and varies by country.  Economists compared suicide rates in countries with shorter exceptions and found statistically significant evidence of moral hazard:

...the shorter the exemption period, the greater the demand for life insurance. And the greater the demand for life insurance, the higher the suicide rate. 

HT:  Mollie

How quickly does a strong dollar benefit consumers?

The answer from the Fed's Stanley Fischer:

One way in which the stronger dollar depresses inflation is by putting downward pressure on import prices. .. 

An important difference between the transmission of dollar appreciation to inflation compared with output is that the effects on inflation are probably more transient. In particular, given that most of the effect on inflation occurs through changes in import prices--and import prices respond quickly to the exchange rate--the peak effect on inflation probably occurs within a few quarters. From the standpoint of the outlook, this transience means that some of the forces holding down inflation in 2015--particularly those due to a stronger dollar and lower energy prices--will begin to fade next year. Consequently, overall PCE inflation is likely on this account alone to rebound next year to around 1-1/2 percent. And as long as inflation expectations remain well anchored, both core and overall inflation are likely to rise gradually toward 2 percent over the medium term as the labor market improves further and the transitory effects of declines in energy and import prices dissipate.

How do brands grow? TV.

Distilled wisdom from Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow: What Marketers Do not Know:

Sharp begins by noting that the majority of any successful brand’s sales comes from “light buyers”: people who buy it relatively infrequently.The consequences of this insight are big:

• ...you will never increase your brand’s market share by targeting existing users ... loyalty programmes, says Sharp, “do practically nothing to drive growth”.
• ...a successful brand needs to find a way of reaching people who are not in its target market, ... advertising must somehow gain the attention of people who are not interested in it, have never bought it, or who bought it so long ago they can’t remember.
• Advertising, says Sharp, works best when it doesn’t try and persuade, but merely makes us remember the brand at the point of purchase
• Brands are not the rich sources of differentiation marketers like to think of them as, but short cuts through the complexity of decision-making. Most consumers aren’t aware of, ... the difference between Nescafé and Kenco and don’t want to spend longer than they need to thinking about which they prefer. They just want to get coffee and get home.
• Brand engagement is largely pointless...A senior marketer at the drinks company Diageo, where Sharp’s book has been influential, put it to me bluntly. “After 10 or 15 years of f***ing around with digital we’ve realised that people don’t want to ‘engage’ with brands, because they don’t care about them.’

So what does all this mean for advertising?

Ideally, it would reach millions of people who aren’t particularly thinking about your product. You’d want them to see the same thing at around the same time, so that they can talk to each other about what they’ve seen, reinforcing each other’s memories of it. You would need to sneak up on them, since they have near-zero interest in hearing from you, indeed don’t want to. You’d need a form of content requiring negligible mental effort to process: one which comes in bite-sized chunks, but which is still capable of moving and delighting. It turns out there is an app for that: the TV ad.

Set the markets free

Wealthy patrons are getting kidneys much more quickly and frequently than poor ones:

Researchers studied the national database of organ donors from 2000 to 2013 and found that patients who simultaneously listed at more than one center had higher transplant rates, lower death rates while waiting, were wealthier and were more likely to be insured.

How do they do it?

... wealthier patients ... have the money for travel, temporary housing and other costs of multiple listing that are not covered by health insurance, Givens said. Patients with state-run Medicaid generally have lower income and may not have the option to list themselves at a center in a different state.

Time is now for a market.

HT:  Marginal Revolution

How are rents determined for Nashville Penthouses?

By an auction:

The starting prices ( see the auction here) underscore the light-speed leaps that rents in the city have taken because of that demand.  

Bidding on the one-bedroom penthouse units begins at $5,300 per month (nope, not a typo). Minimum starting bids for the two-bedroom units range from $5,600 a month to $9,000 a month (still not a typo, I double-checked).  

The minimum bid for a three-bedroom unit is between $8,000 a month to $10,000 a month (people, I have professional editors. These figures are real. See for yourself!)

HT:  Burch

Question: what happens when you reduce punishment?

Answer:  Crime increases

In this case, we are talking about major league pitchers deliberately throwing at batters, called "Hit By Pitcher" or HBP.  In 1994, the HBP rate exploded.  Why?

Before 1994, if a pitcher deliberately hit a batter, the batter's team would retaliate.

After 1994, the rules changed to a "warning-then-eject" rule.  Once the “warning-then-eject” rule was implemented, teams effectively got a free HBP, with no fear of retaliation. Team A hits team B, then both teams get warned and team B can’t retaliate without automatically losing their pitcher and manager! They de-incentivized retaliations to such a degree that they actually incentivized the first HBP.

Article summarizing the history of the HBP rule and with nice graphs of the HBP data: 
http://www.hardballtimes.com/the-hbp-explosion-that-almost-nobody-seems-to-have-noticed/

HT:  Eric E.

Socialism, really?

With a presidential candidate calling himself a socialist and suggesting we emulate Denmark, I want to do a little bubble bursting.  From past blog posts mentioning Denmark.  (The last one on the Scandanavian Model is the most interesting to me.)

2007: High earners flee Denmark utopia

2008: Obama proposes marginal tax rates of 53%

2010:  Denmark: high taxes, big social safety net, but all the talent has left the country

2013: What happens when you tax the hardworking, and subsidize the needy?

2013: The Scandinavian Model

Rev. Mgt. comes to DC (for parking meters)

from the Washington Post:

This “surge pricing” means you could be paying $8 an hour to park in Chinatown-Penn Quarter at peak times. 

You read that right. $8. An hour. 

City officials say the idea is to reduce downtown traffic congestion, 25 percent of which, studies show, is caused by vehicles circling the block looking for a parking space. It is simple supply and demand, they say.

Why do grads of liberal arts colleges earn less?

WSJ reports what those who have read chapter 9 knew all along:

Administrators at some liberal arts colleges say the disparity can be explained in part by the fact their students are following passions that may not yield high earnings, not because the graduates lack job options. They also caution that median earnings figures are skewed in favor of colleges that offer degrees in higher-paying fields such as engineering, business and health care.

Google Expands its Platform Strategy

Google is partnering with General Assembly to offer a boot camp for mobile developers using the Android operating system (reported by Bloomburg and NPR).

According to a report General Assembly released in September, the demand for mobile developers of all types has increased more than 150 percent in the past five years. 

The No. 1 thing they [Android developers] hear from their developer network is, I need more developers!

The Android operating system is core to Google's larger strategy. Helping to train developers to write apps for it will increase the supply of complements to the entire platform. In the longer term, this effort is likely to make the platform that much more valuable.

What happens when Wal-Mart opens a Supercenter?

 Stossel's conclusions are supported by Academic Research:  when Wal Mart opens a supercenter (grocery store), they offer "many identical food items at an average price about 15%-25% lower than traditional supermarkets." This raises welfare for consumers by about 20% of their food expenditures.   In addition to the direct effects of another option for consumers, there is the indirect benefit of increased competition on rival prices, an additional 5%.  And these effects are much bigger for poorer consumers.