Racial Promotion Gaps (at the US patent office). Really!

More junk science published by the American Economic Association (AEA) as I suspect!

Apparently, some economists can not resist to use race baiting!

The first author of this study, i.e. Deepak Hegde (Professor at New York University, Stern School of Business), has only a lifetime citation count of 3544. That is very low! Maybe this paper gets his citation count up a little bit.

"We study racial disparities in promotions in a setting in which promotions are formulaic: the US patent office. Using detailed administrative data that allow us to observe who is eligible for promotion when, we document that Black patent examiners experience delays in promotions they are entitled [???] to, slowing their climb to the top of the career ladder by a year and reducing career earnings by 2.5 percent. Institutional features rule out statistical discrimination with accurate priors. Slow promotions even under Black supervisors argue against taste-based animus. Instead, the patterns fit models of belief-based discrimination."

Racial Promotion Gaps - American Economic Association

Racial Disparities in Housing Returns - American Economic Association. Really!

Again, the AEA promotes junk science and demagoguery!

These very clever authors of this research even capitalized White like in White homeowners! 

This is not an apple to apples comparison, but skin color ideology bias! This is disgusting racist research!

What about white compared to brown or black Hispanic homeowners?

If economic circumstances and location of residence of these homeowners irrespective of skin color had been the same or very similar in this study, then probably no significant "racial differences" nor "racial gap" were found.

From the abstract:

"We show that higher rates of distressed home sales (i.e., foreclosures and short sales) among Black and Hispanic homeowners severely reduce realized housing returns for these groups—in particular, to a level below that realized by White homeowners. Yet absent financial distress, houses owned by minorities do not appreciate at substantially slower rates than houses owned by non minorities. Racial differences [???] in liquidity and income stability, which are imperfectly observed by lenders, are important determinants of differences in distress. Policies that prevent foreclosure among distressed minorities can mitigate the racial gap [???] in returns."

Racial Disparities in Housing Returns - American Economic Association (no public access)

Divine Policy: The Impact of Religion in Government - American Economic Association. Really!

Again, the American Economic Association promotes leftist demagoguery!

Are there no progressive churches in the US? What do they "strengthen"? The oxymoron "gender dysphoria"? Genital mutilation and puberty blockers for teenagers? What else?

The abstract contains a lot of banalities, which seems indicative of junk science.

I bet, the explicit mention of "attitudes against homosexuals" in the abstract is a kind of citation or click bait or in furtherance of the LGBTQ cause in claiming discrimination!

From the abstract:

"Can policies shape personal values and beliefs? To examine, we exploit the staggered introduction of faith-based initiatives across US states.

Our difference-in-differences analysis reveals that the initiatives strengthened religiosity and conservative-religious social views, such as attitudes against homosexuals [???].

The evidence points to causal effects; we find no systematic differences prior to implementation, the results are robust to restricting comparison to contiguous counties and to conducting triple-differences estimation exploiting treatment heterogeneity.

A key explanation, in line with standard models of religion and supported by data on nonprofit organizations, is that the initiatives facilitated the establishment of faith-based organizations."

Divine Policy: The Impact of Religion in Government - American Economic Association (no public access)

The stalled progress of gender equality in the US labor market (Research Highlights Featured Chart by AEA). Really!

It is a disgrace for the American Economic Association to promote such demagoguery! See also my blog post here on this demagoguery of a gender pay gap.

What or how much does workforce participation have to do with this "gender equality"?

What is wrong with the chart below? 

1. Data stops with the 1990s. Why not more recent data?
2. Education, workforce participation and age do not determine wage outcomes as much as other factors! It is foremost the choice of jobs, changing jobs, relocating for jobs, prior job experiences, job promotions, career ambitions and so on!

The authors of this paper use again the old, false, and worn out trope of child rearing (why not elder care etc.)! Although, the US abandoned the draft in 1973, still predominantly men choose military service which may or may not negatively affect/impact their lifetime income as well.

The first author Richard Blundell is a highly recognized, older economist, if I am not mistaken. His accumulated lifetime citation count is 109,830, which is quite good! He started publishing research articles in the late 1970s.

"The gender wage gap narrowed dramatically from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, with women's wages converging toward those of men across all income levels. Then progress stalled, and despite continued advances in women's education and workforce participation over the subsequent quarter century, the gap has persisted. [???] ..."

From the abstract:

"We estimate the full distribution of life cycle wages for cohorts of men and women in the United States using a quantile selection model to account for systematic differences in employment by gender and education group. 

Although common within-group time effects [???] are shown to be a key driver of labor market inequalities across gender, important additional differences by birth cohort emerge with more recent cohorts of women delaying child rearing [???] and, by implication, the onset of child penalties in wages.

These cross-cohort differences help account for the stalling of progress in gender wage gaps over the past quarter century."

The stalled progress of gender equality in the US labor market

Labour market inequality and the changing life cycle profile of male and female wages (original news release from 4/13/2023 plus working paper)

Labor Market Inequality and the Changing Life Cycle Profile of Male and Female Wages (no public access)

Figure 5 from the authors’ paper shows their estimates broken down by educational attainment.

Is Economics a science or voodoo? Latest evidence from the American Economic Association

Two examples from the latest edition of the American Economic Journal:

Macroeconomics (July 2025)! You'll be the judge!

Disclosure: I have a degree in macroeconomics. 😊

Examples:

1. Estimating Macrofiscal Effects of Climate Shocks from Billions of Geospatial Weather Observations - American Economic Association
   When economists resort to weather and climate shocks you should be immediately alerted! Remember: Global Warming is a hoax and climate change is a religion! Of course, some economists like to jump on this bandwagon (for citations and spurious fame)! 😊
   Since the climate change science is junk science to a large extent, the AEA is aiding and abetting to perpetuate it.
2. An American Macroeconomic Picture: Supply and Demand Shocks in the Frequency Domain
   The abstract reads: "We provide a few new empirical facts that theoretical models should feature in order to be consistent with the data.
   (i) There are two classes of shocks: demand and supply. Supply shocks have long-run effects on economic activity; demand shocks do not.
   (ii) Both supply and demand shocks are important sources of business cycles' fluctuations. (iii) Supply shocks are the primary driver for consumption fluctuations, demand shocks for investment.
   (iv) The demand shock is closely related to the credit spread, while the supply shock is essentially a news shock. The results are obtained using a novel frequency domain method."
   Yawn! Yawn! These so called "new empirical facts" have been reported in textbooks of economics since at least the late Paul Samuelson (1915-2009). Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis was first published in 1946/47. Maybe the authors of this study would be well advised to read this textbook.

First edition (1947)

The American Economic Association is becoming stranger and stranger

What is economics according to the AEA? It is becoming murkier and murkier! 

Just weird! Bizarre and esoteric economics! I don't know why I even studied and graduated in economics!

What do we find in the latest edition of American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

1. Article: "Fighting for Tyranny: State Repression and Combat Motivation" Excerpt from abstract: "We utilize over 100 million declassified Red Army personnel records from World War II to study how state repression shapes soldiers' motivation to exert effort in fighting. Exploiting multiple complementary identification strategies, we find that soldiers from places with higher levels of prewar repression under Stalin's rule were more likely to fight until death and less likely to shirk their duties, but they also received fewer decorations for personal bravery. ..."
2. Article: "Activated History: The Case of the Turkish Sieges of Vienna"
   Excerpt from abstract: "We show that history stored in collective memories and activated by political campaigns can create xenophobia and radicalization. Turkish troops besieged Vienna in 1529 and 1683 and pillaged individual Austrian villages, killing and kidnapping in the process. Attacked places remember those events well but never expressed aversion to Muslims until far-right populists started to campaign against Turks and Muslims in the mid-2000s. ..."

Trivial economics: Occupational Matching and Cities

When economists restating the obvious! Does it take an economist to find this out? Besides the dismal science we also have the trivial science! 

Why something so trivial like this is published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics? This is like an undergraduate paper judging from the abstract.

From the abstract:

"In this paper, I document that workers in larger cities have significantly more occupational options than workers in smaller ones. They are able to form better occupational matches and earn higher wages. I also note differences in occupation reallocation patterns across cities. I develop a dynamic model of occupation choice that microfounds agglomeration economies and captures the empirical patterns. The calibration of the model suggests that better occupational match quality accounts for approximately 35 percent of the observed wage premium and one-third of the greater inequality in larger cities."

AEAweb Journal Articles Display

American Economic Journal: Breastfeeding and Child Development. Seriously!

You'll be surprised what economists sometimes study and have published in major journals! Is this called crossover or interdisciplinary research?

Or are economists or economic journals running out of subjects? As an economist myself, I am scratching my head a little bit!

I guess, the old bread and butter subjects like price inflation or international supply chains, topics that really matter, are undervalued by some current economists.

From the abstract: 

"We show that children who are born at or just before the weekend are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services in hospitals at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children's development in the first seven years of life, for a sample of births of low-educated mothers. We find large effects of breastfeeding on children's cognitive development but no effects on health or noncognitive development during the period of childhood we consider. Regarding mechanisms, we study how breastfeeding affects parental investments and the quality of the mother-child relationship."

AEAweb Journal Articles Display

American Economic Association - Stratification economics demagoguery

The prestigious AEA cannot resist to get in on the current propaganda and demagoguery of the day! They have held a Symposium on Race and Economic Literature! They call this stratification economics!

From the abstract of the opening article of this symposium titled "Stratification Economics: Core Constructs and Policy Implications":

"This article introduces the core constructs of stratification economics to provide a coherent explanation for the persistence of intergroup inequalities. Aligned with the critical race theory concept of "the property rights in Whiteness," stratification economics explicitly incorporates the concepts of identity-group investment and group-based agency in the construction of identity-group hierarchies. We survey the intellectual lineage, foundations, tenets and theoretical underpinnings of stratification economics, and conclude with a treatise on inclusive economic rights as an appropriate policy frame to empower people and counteract structural inequalities generated from inter-group conflict and competition for preferred outcomes." (Source)

American Economic Association - Journal of Economic Literature June 2022

Is the American Economic Association also getting into ideology and indoctrination?

Short answer: You bet! Here are two examples of the most recent issue of their flagship publication American Economic Review.

What do these subjects have to do with economics?

From the abstract:

"This paper evaluates an intervention in India that engaged adolescent girls and boys in classroom discussions about gender equality for two years, aiming to reduce their support for societal norms that restrict women's and girls' opportunities. Using a randomized controlled trial, we find that the program made attitudes more supportive of gender equality by 0.18 standard deviations, or, equivalently, converted 16 percent of regressive attitudes. When we resurveyed study participants two years after the intervention had ended, the effects had persisted. The program also led to more gender-equal self-reported behavior, and we find weak evidence that it affected two revealed-preference measures."

Reshaping Adolescents' Gender Attitudes: Evidence from a School-Based Experiment in India - American Economic Association (no public access)

From the abstract:

"This paper examines race and police use of force using data on 1.6 million 911 calls in two cities, neither of which allows for discretion in officer dispatch. Results indicate White officers increase force much more than minority officers when dispatched to more minority neighborhoods. Estimates indicate Black (Hispanic) civilians are 55 (75) percent more likely to experience any force, and five times as likely to experience a police shooting, compared to if White officers scaled up force similarly to minority officers. Additionally, 14 percent of White officers use excess force in Black neighborhoods relative to our statistical benchmark."

Does Race Matter for Police Use of Force? Evidence from 911 Calls (no public access)

High Marginal Tax Rates on the Top 1 Percent Earners? You bet!

The prestigious American Economic Association just published following article in their journal Macroeconomics. What a junk!
Caveat: I do not have access to the full article. Perhaps the AEA should change their policies and open up their articles to the general public!

When economists sell expropriation as science!

From the very brief abstract:

"... We construct a large-scale overlapping generations model with uninsurable labor productivity risk, show that it has a realistic wealth distribution, and numerically characterize the optimal top marginal rate. We find that marginal tax rates for top 1 percent earners of 79 percent are optimal as long as the model earnings and wealth distributions display a degree of concentration as observed in US data."

High Marginal Tax Rates on the Top 1 Percent? Lessons from a Life-Cycle Model with Idiosyncratic Income Risk - American Economic Association (no public access)

Biased Esoterics Or Economics

If you ever wondered why the Great Recession could have happened and why our elected representatives are so inept to deal with it look no further than the (pseudo)science of economics. Adam Smith/Hayek/Mises are spinning in their graves.

I just received the latest e-mail from the American Economic Association (where the brilliant minds of many Nobel laureates meet) containing the table of content and abstracts of American Economic Review (AER) Vol. 101, Issue 7 -- December 2011 (the flagship publication of AEA).

Now looking at individual articles featured in this latest AER:

1.       Title “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa”
The authors state “… we find that individuals whose ancestors were heavily raided during the slave trade are less trusting today.”
Comment: Wow! How did they even establish that the ancestors before slave trade were more trusting? Economists, a new breed of archeologists?

2.       Title “Buffalo Hunt: International Trade and the Virtual Extinction of the North American Bison”
In the very short abstract, the author mentions the emotional loaded word “slaughter” three times as in “… slaughter lasting little more than ten years …”, “… the slaughter was initiated …” and “European demand and American policy failure are jointly responsible for the "Slaughter on the Plains." …” (emphasis added).
Comment: Does this author, perhaps driven by excessive love for animals, propose a monocausal explanation? Since when do economists assign responsibilities in economic papers?

3.       Title “The Effects of Rural Electrification on Employment: New Evidence from South Africa”
We read in the abstract “… I find that electrification significantly raises female employment within five years. This new infrastructure appears to increase hours of work for men and women, while reducing female wages and increasing male earnings. …”.
Comment: Is this an example of gender studies and the notion of manifest gender inequality intruding into economics?

4.       Title “School Desegregation, School Choice, and Changes in Residential Location Patterns by Race”
The authors state “We decompose the well documented decline in white public enrollment following desegregation into migration to suburban districts and increased private school enrollment and find that migration was the more prevalent response. Desegregation caused black public enrollment to increase significantly outside of the South, mostly by slowing decentralization of black households to the suburbs …” (emphasis added).
Comment: I thought their finding in 2011 was already well established for a long time that white population moved into to the suburbs. What is “slowing decentralization” in this context? Economists and linguistics.

5.       Title “The Effect of Newspaper Entry and Exit on Electoral Politics”
The authors conclude “The effect on presidential turnout diminishes after the introduction of radio and television, while the estimated effect on congressional turnout remains similar up to recent years. We find no evidence that partisan newspapers affect party vote shares, with confidence intervals that rule out even moderate-sized effects. We find no clear evidence that newspapers systematically help or hurt incumbents.” (emphasis added)
Comment: What does this have to do with economics? This is a political science study. I don’t think economists in general are sufficiently equipped to make such bold statements. Or this a scientific cover for obviously leftist and influential major newspapers like Washington Post and New York Times?

6.       Title “Endogenous Information Flows and the Clustering of Announcements”
The authors “show that bad market news can trigger the immediate release of information by firms. Conversely, good market news slows the release of information by firms. Thus, our model generates clustering of negative announcements. Surprisingly, this result holds only when firms can preemptively disclose their own information prior to the arrival of external information.” (emphasis added).
Comment: I am impressed that economists of our times again and again confirm common sense. What is the surprise here? When the management of a company senses that the arrival of external information is imminent then it makes sense to release your own information as soon as possible. Is this perhaps an example for economists never having worked in the real economy for a for profit private enterprise?

7.       Title “Who Thinks about the Competition? Managerial Ability and Strategic Entry in US Local Telephone Markets”
The authors say “This motivates a structural econometric model based on behavioral game theory that allows heterogeneity in managers' ability to conjecture competitor behavior. We find that manager characteristics are key determinants in managerial ability. This estimate of ability predicts out-of-sample success.” (emphasis added)
Comment: This result smacks of banality and triviality.

8.       Title “Media and Political Persuasion: Evidence from Russia”
The authors state following purpose of their study “This paper compares electoral outcomes of 1999 parliamentary elections in Russia among geographical areas with differential access to the only national TV channel independent from the government.” (emphasis added)
Comment: This is another political science or media influence study in a premier economics journal. See also no. 5 above.

9.       Title “The Consequences of Radical Reform: The French Revolution”
In the opinion of the authors “The French Revolution had a momentous impact on neighboring countries. It removed the legal and economic barriers protecting oligarchies, established the principle of equality before the law, and prepared economies for the new industrial opportunities of the second half of the 19th century.” (emphasis added).
Comment: Again economists endeavor to be historians and political scientists as well (See also no. 1 above). That is a huge calling for any economist. From the title and abstract one gets the impression that the authors glorify the French Revolution by ignoring all its dark sides. Were there not, e.g., expanding price controls and executions of offenders in France during this time?

I think I will stop here after the first 16 articles out of a total of 25 articles listed and abstracted in the above e-mail sent by AEA. One gets the idea where I am coming from.

To be fair, there was at least one positive article worth mentioning among the first 16 of 25. Title “Dynamic Inefficiencies in an Employment-Based Health Insurance System: Theory and Evidence”. A subject, which is very relevant in our times to millions of employees and our elected representatives. The authors conclude correctly “Health is a form of general human capital; labor turnover and labor-market frictions prevent an employer-employee pair from capturing the entire surplus from investment in an employee's health. Thus, the pair underinvests in health during working years, thereby increasing medical expenditures during retirement.”. It is indeed high time the US abandons this socialist employment-based health care system. Private individual health care insurance in a free market economy is only way consistent with the US Constitution and with the magnificent ideals/convictions of the founding fathers and mothers. If the US wants to continue to be a beacon of hope and a shining city on a hill it is way overdue to reform health care insurance along these lines.