Tag Archives: freakonomics

Evaluating government programs

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Via the Freakonomics blog, this Washington Post article discusses the problem of evaluating government programs:

The case of Even Start stands out because it is so rare. At a time when the federal budget is increasingly squeezed — and lawmakers are wrestling with tough choices on what to cut or to keep — the government does very, very little to find out which programs produce the best results for the money spent on them.

There are several reasons for that, most wrapped up in politics. There’s no natural ideological constituency for program evaluations. Lawmakers who champion social programs often fear that attempts to measure them will be only thinly disguised excuses to kill the programs. Fiscal hawks don’t often love the idea of spending more money on evaluations.

The frame of the article is that recently some economists are calling for a more institutionalized process for evaluating government programs. One proposal is to start by including evaluations in decisions for federal transfers to state and local governments:

[Harvard economist and former Obama budget official] Jeffrey Liebman’s most specific proposal would change the flow of federal money to state and local governments. He would require that 1 percent of such grants be set aside for programs whose effectiveness has been proven through randomized or other rigorous research methods. Over time, the requirement would rise to 5 percent.

Given there is “no natural ideological constituency” for this sort of thing, how do the economists expect policy makers to get on board? Apparently there are some assumptions about the wisdom of voters and the electoral incentive.

But if Washington ever hopes to provide the services voters say they want, at the tax rates voters say they’re willing to pay, economists say the government will need to ramp up its efforts to figure out which programs work and which ones don’t, and shift resources accordingly.

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That’s especially bad at a time when Washington is debating tax increases and spending cuts to reduce the federal deficit, said Jeffrey Liebman, a Harvard economist and also a former Obama budget official. “It’s imperative to be able to show that the things [voters’] tax dollars are being spent on work, and that we’re trying to improve performance and do it in a data-driven way,” Liebman said. “That’s just good stewardship.”

Are elected representatives more responsive in election years?

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Election-year adjustments in a lawmaker’s voting pattern are common. But this election cycle is shaping up as unique. The pressure from the right flank of the Republican Party is intense, and unlike in 2010, party veterans this time around have had time to see it coming after the last primary season bumped off or nearly toppled so many of their colleagues.

So writes Jonathan Weisman in the New York Times on February 25th. Which made me wonder: has it been shown empirically that “election-year adjustments in a lawmaker’s voting pattern are common”?

This would be hard to test with members of the House, since they are up for election every two years. But one could test it with senators, which is what this article is about. And in fact this is what Steven Levitt (who later went on to Freakonomics fame) does in a 1996 article in the American Economic Review. The money paragraph:

As elections near, the weight given [by senators] to overall state voter preferences doubles, with that increase being offset by a decline in the weight placed on the party line…These results suggest that senators alter their voting patterns as elections approach to better reflect the preferences of the median voter. Senators apparently consider voters to be myopic since most of the change in voting patterns is concentrated in the election year itself (435-436).

“Spacing Children Farther Apart Benefits Older Siblings”

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Via the New York Times, this post at the Freakonomics blog caught my attention:

A new study (PDF here) by University of Notre Dame economist Kasey Buckles and graduate student Elizabeth Munnich finds that siblings spaced more than two years apart have higher reading and math scores than children born closer together. The positive effects were seen only in older siblings, not in younger ones.

The NYT post doesn’t address the selection issue–that those who choose to space their children apart may just be “better” parents than those who don’t. But the actual paper, and the Freakonomics post, does: the authors take advantage of the fact that some families wait between births due to factors beyond their control, i.e. miscarriages. This from the paper’s abstract:

However, because we are concerned that spacing may be correlated with unobservable characteristics, we also use an instrumental variables strategy that exploits variation in spacing driven by miscarriages that occur between two live births. The IV results indicate that a one-year increase in spacing increases test scores for older siblings by about 0.17 standard deviations—an effect comparable to estimates of the effect of birth order. Especially close spacing (less than two years) decreases scores by 0.65 SD. These results are larger than the OLS estimates, suggesting that estimates that fail to account for the endogeneity of spacing may understate its benefits.

Interesting stuff. So my question is whether the authors think they are going to convince policy makers that they should come up with incentives to influence birth spacing?

What drives the crime rate: your guess is as good as mine?

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I am puzzled that the experts are baffled. As shown by the authors of “Freakonomics,” the majority of the reduction in crime over the last decade and a half can be attributed to the legalization of abortion, first in certain states, then in the entire nation. Obviously, unwanted children are more prone to crime, probably because they are not raised with sufficient caring.

From a May 30 letter to the editor, one of several, in response to a New York Times story on a “baffling” decline in crime. I found the Freakonomics reference comical. Read the other letters and you’ll see that apparently everyone has their pet explanation for what drives crime. Criminologists, help us out!

Do parents matter?

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It’s the age-old nature-or-nurture debate. Ms. Chua clearly favors the nurture side of the equation (if her heavy-handed approach could be described as “nurturing”). Mr. Caplan, who has already been dubbed the “Un-Tiger Mom,” writes, “While healthy, smart, happy, successful, virtuous parents tend to have matching offspring, the reason is largely nature, not nurture.”

Though Mr. Caplan’s prescription for an increased birthrate is a new twist, variations of the argument have been made before. In the mid-’90s, Judith Rich Harris wrote in “The Nurture Assumption” that peers have a much greater impact on children than parents do. More recently, in “Freakonomics,” Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner wrote that “it isn’t so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it’s who you are.”

So writes Motoko Rich in the New York Times. In general I thought this piece was okay. It is a little unfair in that it equates Amy Chua and economists like Levitt and Heckman in terms of their credibility on the subject. But on the other hand, the research on this question doesn’t seem entirely conclusive, so it may be the economists’ own fault for the confusion.