Wednesday, November 28, 2007

How high (low?) can you go?

From the LA Times:

For the first time since 1980, obesity figures [in the USA; TH] are unchanged since the previous survey two years earlier.

How low (or high?) can you go?

(HT: Tyler Cowen) Zimbabwe's state is so abysmal:
Zimbabwe's chief statistician has said it is impossible to work out the country's latest inflation rate because of the lack of goods in shops. [..] September's inflation rate was put at almost 8,000%, the world's highest. [...] Mr Nyoni [the head statistician; TH] said the Central Statistical Office has delayed the release of the inflation figure until an accurate way of calculating it can be found.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Kennedy and the Lone Gunman

Everyone has seen the Zapruder film of the Kennedy Assassination. But what if the film captures shot two and three, but not the very first one fired at the presidential motorcade? An opinion piece in the NYT argues this:

And why has it taken so long to realize that the assassination and the Zapruder film are not one and the same? Part of the answer lies in the power of the film itself. As the critic Richard B. Woodward wrote in The Times in 2003, the assassination became “fused with one representation, so much so that Kennedy’s death is virtually unimaginable without Zapruder’s film.” To that, one has to add the element of distraction. The Warren Commission did not pursue its May 1964 insight because it was fixated not on the shot that missed but on the ones that killed the president.

If this belated revelation changes nothing from one perspective — Oswald still did it — it simultaneously changes everything, if only because it disrupts the state of mind of everyone who has ever been transfixed by the Zapruder film. The film, we realize, does not depict an assassination about to commence. It shows one that had already started.


That brings back memories of a hotel lobby in Washington where the hotel staff ordered a group of people (including me) back to their rooms when a (slightly drunk) friend of mine loudly insisted that Bell Helicopter was involved in the the JFK assissination.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Is the surge working?

Is it working? Let's look at bonds markets. Michael Greenstone of MIT does so (link to paper on his website). Here's the abstract of his paper:

There is a paucity of facts about the effects of the recent military Surge on conditions in Iraq and whether it is paving the way for a stable Iraq. Selective, anecdotal and incomplete analyses abound. Policy makers and defense planners must decide which measures of success or failure are most important, but until now few, if any, systematic analyses were available on which to base those decisions. This paper applies modern statistical techniques to a new data file derived from more than a dozen of the most reliable and widely-cited sources to assess the Surge's impact on three key dimensions: the functioning of the Iraqi state (including civilian casualties); military casualties; and financial markets' assessment of Iraq's future. The new and unusually rigorous findings presented here should help inform current evaluations of the Surge and provide a basis for better decision making about future strategy.

The analysis reveals mixed evidence on the Surge's effect on key trends in Iraq. The security situation has improved insofar as civilian fatalities have declined without any concurrent increase in casualties among coalition and Iraqi troops. However, other areas, such as oil production and the number of trained Iraqi Security Forces have shown no improvement or declined. Evaluating such conflicting indicators is challenging.

There is, however, another way to assess the Surge. This paper shows how data from world financial markets can be used to shed light on the central question of whether the Surge has increased or diminished the prospect of today's Iraq surviving into the future. In particular, I examine the price of Iraqi state bonds, which the Iraqi government is currently servicing, on world financial markets. After the Surge, there is a sharp decline in the price of those bonds, relative to alternative bonds. The decline signaled a 40% increase in the market's expectation that Iraq will default. This finding suggests that to date the Surge is failing to pave the way toward a stable Iraq and may in fact be undermining it.


HT to Gary Becker and Richard Posner who have further comments. Becker says this (amongst other things) this: "Whatever the final conclusions about the evidence on the political future of Iraq provided by its bonds, financial markets are an underutilized source of information about the expectations of investors about political outcomes."

More Hansonianism

For those that might think that Robin Hanson deals with economics and is therefore only partially relevant to IR, let me preventively counter by linking to his latest post at Overcoming Bias. He delineates nicely how prediction markets (on JSTOR) can inform development policies. Now that's IR and IPE.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Big, BIG Ideas by Robin Hanson

George Mason's Robin Hanson is one of the most prolific, earth-shaking thinkers I can think of. (The UK Observer commented on him: "Flicking through Robin's thoughts ... you start to feel the ground shifting beneath you.") A very concise primer is this 70 minute interview from Guatemala. It is by and large covers everything Hanson covers: transhumanism, roboters, future of humanity, health economics, prediction markets, rationality of disagreement. Check it out. No, wait: CHECK IT OUT. Also check out OvercomingBias, where he is one of the bloggers. EconTalk did an interview with him as well.

Here are a few of my favorite readings:
- Catastrophe, Social Collapse, and Human Extinction (PDF)
- Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs? (PDF) - I've never made so many positive as well as negative remarks at the margins of the printout.
- Cut Medicine in Half
- Fourteen Wild Ideas - Five Of Which Are True!

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The more you travel, the more you will export?

In the latest issue of The World Economy, Volker Nitsch investigates whether more state visits are correlated with higher levels of trade. Here's the abstract.

Politicians travel extensively abroad, for various reasons. One purpose of external visits is to improve bilateral economic relations. In this paper, I examine the effect of state visits on international trade. Based on a large data set that covers the travel activities of the heads of state of France, Germany and the United States for the period from 1948 to 2003, I find that state and official visits are indeed positively correlated with exports. I first apply a gravity model of trade to control for other trade determinants and find that a visit is typically associated with higher exports by about 8 to 10 per cent; the results are sensitive to the type of visit (as they should). I then use a differences-in-differences specification to deal with the issue of reverse causality. The results show a strong, but short-lived effect of visits on bilateral exports growth, which is driven by repeated visits to a country. Additional support is provided by an exploratory instrumental variables analysis.


Maybe this effect even trumps the contract-intensive-money effects?

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

APSR, November Issue

The new issue of the American Political Science Review is out. Robert Powell's article has the highest symbols-to-plain-words ratio I've ever encountered in a political science piece.