jamesz

School choice and paternalism

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There is a very interesting report out from the Social Market Foundation that investigates the characteristics parents value in a school. The core result is that less-wealthy families do not choose schools on the basis of academic achievement:

SMF_school_choice_2

This leads the SMF to express concern that school choice may not lift educational achievement because some parents do not consider it important. They then recommend Government intervention to promote the primacy of academic success. The line they’re treading between free choice and paternalism is a fine one. One the one hand, they want free school choice to improve the quality of schooling. On the other hand, they have a prescriptive view of what school quality means. Read more

jamesz

Performance pay for the public sector?

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In December last year The Work Foundation released a comprehensive review of performance-related pay in the public sector:

PRP schemes can be effective in improving outcomes across the three public services for which evidence is available (health, education and the civil service), although the central conclusion is that the outcomes from PRP are mixed, which much dependent upon organisational and occupational context and scheme design and implementation. Where positive effects have been found, effect sizes are sometimes small and may also be short-lived. As well as evidence gaps across much of the public services, the weight of evidence also varies, with the more robust evidence coming from education and health rather than the civil service. Cost-effectiveness data to assess the value for money of PRP interventions is also rare.

The implication is that performance-related pay isn’t a quick fix: it requires careful development to fit it to the context, and organisations might take a while to adapt to it and see benefits. Without more examples in the public sector it isn’t possible to say whether it will prove cost-effective.

jamesz

Behavioural economics in public policy

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Earlier this year Raj Chetty gave the keynote address at the annual AEA meeting. He discussed the role of behavioural economics for public policy, giving examples of successful nudges such as a change in defaults for retirement saving. Unusually, he took the goal of policy as given and spent his lecture talking about how behavioural economics can help achieve those goals. Read more

jamesz

Alesina on austerity: round 2

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Alberto Alesina has returned to the fray with a new paper that shows how tax rises are far more damaging than tax cuts. With a new dataset covering the recessionary years, this is the most up-to-date evidence on fiscal consolidation available. Importantly, they are unable to discern evidence that the ZLB caused the effects of fiscal policy to be greater. Of course, this isn’t the final word and it’s only one piece of evidence, but I’ll be reading it closely over the next few days.

Fiscal adjustments based upon cuts in spending appear to have been much less costly, in terms of output losses, than those based upon tax increases. The difference between the two types of adjustment is very large. Our results, however, are mute on the question whether the countries we have studied did the right thing implementing fiscal austerity at the time they did, that is 2009-13.

jamesz

The Economist’s misguided lecture to macroeconomists

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In a bizarre leader article The Economist praises microeconomists for their use of data to better predict people’s behaviour and recommend macroeconomists do the same:

Macroeconomists are puritans, creating theoretical models before testing them against data. The new breed [of microeconomists] ignore the whiteboard, chucking numbers together and letting computers spot the patterns. And macroeconomists should get out more. The success of micro is its magpie approach, stealing ideas from psychology to artificial intelligence. If macroeconomists mimic some of this they might get some cool back. They might even make better predictions.

I’m tempted to label this as obvious baiting but the misunderstanding is deeper than that. Read more

jamesz

The problem with paternalism

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