Prize competition - earn a $1,000

I have an interest in German fighter pilots during World War II (yes, it's a research project joint with Philip Ager and Leo Bursztyn). We particularly care about status competition amongst top-scoring pilots (the image on the left shows victory marking on the tailgate of a Messerschmidt).

We need data on pilot training, especially a brief history of which fighter schools people passed through (Luftkampfschule and Jagdfliegerschule). Anyone who can send me a detailed list containing that information about the top 200-scoring German aces should get in touch via email -- I promise to pay $1,000 or euro equivalent (first $500 for the first 100; the next $500 for the second).

We have tried our luck in the archives, to little avail; but it may just be possible that enthusiasts somewhere sit on this information, or something closely related... So let's see if "markets in everything" actually works (or prizes for the right kind of thing).

*** update 30-1-2017 *** We have actually located the right source for this (and no, nobody sent in the winning suggestion - just hard work with the German federal archives allowed us to locate the right place).

Goodbye SSRN

SSRN has been sucked into the Death Star of academic publishing, the Dutch company called Elsevier. The story is here. It's obvious what they are about -- making it impossible for people to read versions of papers published in Elsevier journals in a slightly earlier version. If you happen not to be part of the $40 per pdf paying crowd, that was a great alternative; find the same paper's wp on SSRN, and be done. Despite some weasly-worded promises, it's clear that this is what Elsevier wants to stop. After buying Mendeley, a platform for citation management and paper depository, Elsevier is basically trying to capture enough of the knowledge-sharing between academics to stop threats to its hyper-profitable overcharge-for-open-access-or-subscription model.

There is a credible alternative view, espoused here: that it's all about the value of data to Elsevier. I am skeptical... surely a firm like Elsevier could have gotten that kind of data for less?

Be that as it may: For the last 15 years, I uploaded my papers religiously on SSRN. I even had a line below my signature advertising my latest working papers there. It was a great platform to make stuff available. But barriers to entry are L O W. When I have a minute, I will move stuff to REPEC or IDEAS; there will surely be a competitor along that does at least as good a job as SSRN (which was never that great to start with). 

Mills and institutions

Will Goetzmann and collaborators have a new paper in circulation that looks institutional innovation over the last millennium or so... Medieval mills were high-tech and expensive to build, and it turns out that many of the things that make modern corporations tick (or not tick so well) were already tried out in the joint stock companies that financed and operated these mills. Here is the abstract:

We exploit unique archives extending over six centuries to trace the development
of corporate governance mechanisms that emerged in response to problems inherent in
organizing, capitalizing and sustaining large-scale business enterprises. Two Toulouse
milling concerns with antecedents in the 11th century organized themselves via mergers
into widely-held joint-stock companies in the years 1372 and 1373. We document the
institutional innovations they developed over the ensuing centuries, and place these
in the context of institutional economic theory. The rms adapted or invented insti-
tutional features that are widely recognizable today, including fully tradable shares,
limited liability, shareholder meetings, governing boards, cash payout policies, account-
ing audits and mechanisms for re-capitalization.

The paper has some interesting implications. First, it shows that it wasn't Northern Europe that invented the corporate form. Second, it shows that the advantages of joint stock companies seem forever elusive -- they don't out-compete other corporate forms today, and they didn't back then. This casts doubts on theories of development that put a shortage of capital center-stage. Plenty of food for thought here... 

migrating extremists

Christian Oechsner and Felix Roesner have an interesting paper on migrating extremists. When Austria was partitioned after WWII into different zones of occupation, the Russians got a bit "extra". Since the last thing you wanted as a Nazi was to be under Russian occupation, it is likely that many Nazis migrated out of that extra bit of Upper Austria coming to the Russians. Oechsner and Roesner show that in these areas, there is much more right-wing voting after 1945 than one would expect, given pre-1938 trends... and that the pattern persists to the present day, with FPÖ results inexplicably high in areas just outside the newly expanded Russian zone. Here is the abstract:

We show that migrating extremists shape political landscapes toward their ideology in the long run. We exploit the unexpected division of the state of Upper Austria into a US and a Soviet occupation zone after WWII. Zoning prompts large-scale Nazi migration to US occupied regions. Regions that witnessed a Nazi influx exhibit significantly higher voting shares for the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) throughout the entire post-WWII period, but not before WWII. We can exclude other channels that may have affected post-war elections, including differences in US and Soviet denazification and occupation policies, bomb attacks, Volksdeutsche refugees and suppression by other political parties. We show that extremism is transmitted through family ties and local party branches. We find that the surnames of FPÖ local election candidates in 2015 in the former US zone are more prevalent in 1942 phonebook data (Reichstelefonbuch) of the former Soviet zone compared to other parties.

David Card

awesome portrait of an awesome economist:

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/03/people.htm

Attitudes after the killing fields

There has been quite a bit of recent literature looking at the effects of exposure to war and political violence on attitudes. Couttenier, Protu,  Rohner and Thoenig have a recent paper on immigrants in Switzerland that is beautiful in terms of identification. Now, another paper came across my desk that looks super-interesting - Lata Gangadharan and co-authors have a paper on the after-effects of the Cambodian genocide. This was one of the biggest exterminations in recent history, carried out with incredible ferocity -- probably, some 2 million Cambodians were killed, equivalent to 25% of the population.

The abstract is:

We use a field experiment to examine the long-term effects of exposure to the
Cambodian genocide (1975-1979), on individuals’ pro-social and anti-social behavior and risk
preferences. We show that individuals who were exposed to the genocide during childhood
and early adolescence are less trusting, less altruistic, and more risk averse than those who
were not exposed. Our results are corroborated by survey questions on personality traits. The
findings suggest that direct exposure to genocide during childhood and early adolescence has
a lasting impact on social capital and on attitudes towards risk and could make individuals less
extroverted and agreeable.

True "open source"

This should be the future of science: http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science -- a way to download every paper ever written, without paywalls etc. I was glad to see that you can get "Persecution Perpetuated", say, here (thanks to whoever donated it). In general, it seems that all you need to do is to add "sci-hub.io" to the url, so that
"http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/127/3/1339.full" becomes
"http://qje.oxfordjournals.org.sci-hub.io/content/127/3/1339.full".

The ethics are quite clear... I just hope they don't end up the way Napster did.