General Economics
- [1] arXiv:2405.10494 [pdf, ps, html, other]
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Title: Estimating Idea Production: A Methodological SurveySubjects: General Economics (econ.GN)
Accurately modeling the production of new ideas is crucial for innovation theory and endogenous growth models. This paper provides a comprehensive methodological survey of strategies for estimating idea production functions. We explore various methods, including naive approaches, linear regression, maximum likelihood estimation, and Bayesian inference, each suited to different data availability settings. Through case studies ranging from total factor productivity to software R&D, we show how to apply these methodologies in practice. Our synthesis provides researchers with guidance on strategies for characterizing idea production functions and highlights obstacles that must be addressed through further empirical validation.
- [2] arXiv:2405.10498 [pdf, ps, html, other]
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Title: A Deep Learning Approach to Heterogeneous Consumer Aesthetics in Retail FashionSubjects: General Economics (econ.GN)
In some markets, the visual appearance of a product matters a lot. This paper investigates consumer transactions from a major fashion retailer, focusing on consumer aesthetics. Pretrained multimodal models convert images and text descriptions into high-dimensional embeddings. The value of these embeddings is verified both empirically and by their ability to segment the product space. A discrete choice model is used to decompose the distinct drivers of consumer choice: price, visual aesthetics, descriptive details, and seasonal variations. Consumers are allowed to differ in their preferences over these factors, both through observed variation in demographics and allowing for unobserved types. Estimation and inference employ automatic differentiation and GPUs, making it scalable and portable. The model reveals significant differences in price sensitivity and aesthetic preferences across consumers. The model is validated by its ability to predict the relative success of new designs and purchase patterns.
- [3] arXiv:2405.10851 [pdf, ps, other]
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Title: Bottom-up approach to assess carbon emissions of battery electric vehicle operations in ChinaComments: 6 pages, 6 figuresSubjects: General Economics (econ.GN)
The transportation sector is the third-largest global energy consumer and emitter, making it a focal point in the transition toward the net-zero future. To accelerate the decarbonization of passenger cars, this work is the first to propose a bottom-up charging demand model to estimate the operational electricity use and associated carbon emissions of best-selling battery electric vehicles (BEVs) in various climate zones in China during the 2020s. The findings reveal that (1) the operational energy demand of the top-20 selling BEV models in China, such as Tesla, Wuling Hongguang, and BYD, increased from 601 to 3054 giga-watt hours (GWh) during 2020-2022, with BEVs in South China contributing more than half of the total electricity demand; (2) from 2020 to 2022, the energy and carbon intensities of the best-selling models decreased from 1364 to 1095 kilowatt-hour per vehicle and from 797 to 621 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO2) per vehicle, respectively, with North China experiencing the highest intensity decline compared to that in other regions; and (3) the operational energy demand of BEV stocks in China increased from 4774 to 12,048 GWh during 2020-2022, while the carbon emissions of BEV stocks rose to 6.8 mega-tons of CO2 in 2022, reflecting an annual growth rate of ~50%. In summary, this work delves into the examination and contrast of benchmark data on a nation-regional scale, as well as performance metrics related to BEV chargings. The primary aim is to support nationwide efforts in decarbonization, aiming for carbon mitigation and facilitating the swift evolution of passenger cars toward a carbon-neutral future.
- [4] arXiv:2405.10884 [pdf, ps, other]
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Title: Road to perdition? The effect of illicit drug use on labour market outcomes of prime-age men in MexicoSubjects: General Economics (econ.GN)
This study addresses the impact of illicit drug use on the labour market outcomes of men in Mexico. We leverage statistical information from three waves of a comparable national survey and make use of Lewbel's heteroskedasticity-based instrumental variable strategy to deal with the endogeneity of drug consumption. Our results suggests that drug consumption has quite negative effects in the Mexican context: It reduces employment, occupational attainment and formality and raises unemployment of local men. These effects seem larger than those estimated for high-income economies
New submissions for Monday, 20 May 2024 (showing 4 of 4 entries )
- [5] arXiv:2405.10338 (cross-list from physics.soc-ph) [pdf, ps, other]
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Title: Financial Interactions and Capital AccumulationPierre Gosselin (IF), Aïleen LotzSubjects: Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); Other Condensed Matter (cond-mat.other); General Economics (econ.GN)
In a series of precedent papers, we have presented a comprehensive methodology, termed Field Economics, for translating a standard economic model into a statistical field-formalism framework. This formalism requires a large number of heterogeneous agents, possibly of different types. It reveals the emergence of collective states among these agents or type of agents while preserving the interactions and microeconomic features of the system at the individual level. In two prior papers, we applied this formalism to analyze the dynamics of capital allocation and accumulation in a simple microeconomic framework of investors and firms.Building upon our prior work, the present paper refines the initial model by expanding its scope. Instead of considering financial firms investing solely in real sectors, we now suppose that financial agents may also invest in other financial firms. We also introduce banks in the system that act as investors with a credit multiplier. Two types of interaction are now considered within the financial sector: financial agents can lend capital to, or choose to buy shares of, other financial firms. Capital now flows between financial agents and is only partly invested in real sectors, depending on their relative returns. We translate this framework into our formalism and study the diffusion of capital and possible defaults in the system, both at the macro and micro this http URL the macro level, we find that several collective states may emerge, each characterized by a distinct level of average capital and investors per sector. These collective states depend on external parameters such as level of connections between investors or firms' productivity.The multiplicity of possible collective states is the consequence of the nature of the system composed of interconnected heterogeneous agents. Several equivalent patterns of returns and portfolio allocation may emerge. The multiple collective states induce the unstable nature of financial markets, and some of them include defaults may emerge. At the micro level, we study the propagation of returns and defaults within a given collective state. Our findings highlight the significant role of banks, which can either stabilize the system through lending activities or propagate instability through loans to investors.
Cross submissions for Monday, 20 May 2024 (showing 1 of 1 entries )
- [6] arXiv:2401.11100 (replaced) [pdf, ps, other]
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Title: Long-term Effects of India's Childhood Immunization Program on Earnings and Consumption Expenditure: CommentSubjects: General Economics (econ.GN)
Summan, Nandi, and Bloom (2023; SNB) studies the long-term effects of India's Uni-versal Immunization Programme (UIP). SNB finds that infants exposed to the UIP in the late 1980s had higher wages in early adulthood (0.138 log points) and higher per-capita household consumption (0.028 points). The results are attained by regressing on age while controlling for year of birth, two variables that are nearly collinear. As a result, the identifying variation in treatment is associated not with the staggered introduction of the UIP across India's districts in the late 1980s, but with the progression of time during the one-year follow-up survey period in 2011-12. The SNB findings are subject to confounding from economic growth and other trends during that period. Such confounders likely dominate because wages and consumption rose nearly as much among those too old to have been exposed to the UIP.
- [7] arXiv:2402.03894 (replaced) [pdf, ps, html, other]
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Title: Interpersonal trust: Asymptotic analysis of a stochastic coordination game with multi-agent learningComments: 17 pages, 4 figuresSubjects: Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); General Economics (econ.GN)
We study the interpersonal trust of a population of agents, asking whether chance may decide if a population ends up in a high trust or low trust state. We model this by a discrete time, random matching stochastic coordination game. Agents are endowed with an exponential smoothing learning rule about the behaviour of their neighbours. We find that, with probability one in the long run the whole population either always cooperates or always defects. By simulation we study the impact of the distributions of the payoffs in the game and of the exponential smoothing learning (memory of the agents). We find, that as the agent memory increases or as the size of the population increases, the actual dynamics start to resemble the expectation of the process. We conclude that it is indeed possible that different populations may converge upon high or low trust between its citizens simply by chance, though the game parameters (context of the society) may be quite telling.