Stockhammer

Samen met Ozlem Onaran, huiseconomen ILO

Baseline: als het loonaandeel in het BBP daalt dreigt een overproductiecrisis

Er zijn wage led & profit led regimes:

Wage led: de groei van het BBP is vooral loongestuurd, door de hogere consumptiequote van werknemers (demand led growth)

Profit led regimes: de groei is gestuurd vanuit investeringen die gebeuren met de winsten en de hogere export


De wereld is als gehele economie zeker wage led, want men kan niet exporteren naar een andere planeet. Gesloten economieën zijn dit dus ook (vb. EU). Kleine open economieën (vb. Oostenrijk) kunnen baat hebben bij een profit led aanpak, en dus loonmatiging.

Kleinknecht

Base line: creatieve destructie.

Als looneisen hoger zijn, sneuvelen die bedrijven die niet performant zijn. Lage lonen verhinderen een survival of the fittest.

Similar websites

http://socialdatablog.com/
> I think this one is Steve Powell - he's quite good in that

LaTeX: personal walk through the preamble

Introduction

LaTeX is much like the R statistical package: it forces you to load the parts of the program you will need. In contrast, most word processors load these options straight away in a standard installation - yet you may have noticed that you need to install language packs separately, for example. In LaTeX, you need to load all of it. Brilliant.

There is a good reason for this bad behaviour. It's not necessarily speed, because that doesn't seem to be a restricting factor anymore. It's rather the extensibility of the program, as well as the problems that go with it: sometimes one package conflicts with another, so we can't have both. I still think it's a serious design flaw, but it's not going to change anytime soon, I guess. So here's how to (learn to) live with it.

Packages

This is the list of packages I use in my most complex document. 

Lay-out

• Framed: provides the commans -shaded-, -snugshade- and -leftbar-. I use snugshade for background-filled boxes. You need to define the 'shadecolor' with the color-package.
• Color: define the colours you will use when loading this package

http://www.slideshare.net/linjaaho/how-to-make-boxed-text-with-latex

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Colors

Fonts

• Inputenc: allows French characters with option utf8
• Fontenc: I don't know what it does but I set the option to T1. I believe it matters for BibLaTeX
• Csquotes: use option autostyle=try. This interpretes quotes, so you don't need LaTeX code to use them.

% styles: http://www.emerson.emory.edu/services/latex/latex_168.html#SEC168D

% Option clash

Tables and figures

• Graphicx
• Caption
• Tabularx
• Booktabs
• Array - permits justification options and fixed column width
• Pgfplots: this load the TikZ language

In the preamble, specify \graphicspath{{/Users/macuser/folder/}} or anything similar on Windows so LaTeX knows where you put your graphics. I honestly love this orderly behaviour.

Bibliography

I have written a separate post on BibLaTeX. It's a pain in the X$$.

%http://texblog.org/2007/11/14/hyper-links-to-the-pdfs/

% ISSUE !!! Several capital letters in a row.

% http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/19721/bibtex-export-for-corporate-authors-single-name-only/

% http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/69594/biber-fails-at-supporting-in-author-names

% Info BibLaTeX http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/5091/what-to-do-to-switch-to-biblatex

%\usepackage[dutch]{babel}

\usepackage[american]{babel}

%\selectlanguage{dutch} 

\selectlanguage{american} 

\usepackage[style=apa, backend=biber, url=false, doi=false]{biblatex} 

% , natbib=true

% , style=apa/authoryear/verbose/numeric(default)/alphabetic/authortitle

% \usepackage[safeinputenc]{biblatex}

\DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}  % for apa

% \DeclareLanguageMapping{dutch}{dutch-apa}   % for apa

%\addbibresource{/Users/name/Dropbox/KeepCloud/zoterobibtex.bib} % MAC

\addbibresource{C:/Users/name/Dropbox/KeepCloud/zoterobibtex.bib} % PC

% zotero biblatex exporter misses out on dates

% problem with zotero bib files: too many brackets 

% solution: biber.conf in working folder or anjo biblatex translator / robintan bibtex translator

%\usepackage[backend=biber, style=authoryear-icomp, sortlocale=nl_NL, natbib=true, url=false, 

%    doi=true, eprint=false]{biblatex}

% http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/54833/biblatex-apa-biber

%%% Language %%%

% http://www.kronto.org/thesis/tips/multiple-languages.html

Math

• Amsmath: it's more or less mandatory
• Amsfonts
• Amssymb
• Xfrac: provides slant frac / through \sfrac{}

User modifcations

There are a lot of tweaks you may way to do to make your work look good. In doing so, you change the LaTeX wonderful defaults, so you may have used Word after all. But once you got that far, you're probably to tired to start over and you'll fuck up LaTeX till you get results without visible collateral damage.

%\usepackage[all]{nowidow}

%\clubpenalty=9996

%\widowpenalty=9999

%\usepackage[hmargin=3cm,vmargin=3.5cm]{geometry}

%\newcommand{\myparagraph}[1]{\paragraph{#1}\mbox{}\\}

%http://hapticity.net/2007/03/23/latex-itemize-bullet-characters/

\def\labelitemi{--}

%\usepackage{needspace}

%\needspace{8\baselineskip}

%$\newcommand{\E}{\mathrm{E}}$

\newcommand{\E}{\mathbb E}

\newcommand{\Var}{\mathrm{Var}}

\newcommand{\Cov}{\mathrm{Cov}}

\synctex=1

Meta-info

\author{name}

\title{title}

\date{date}

Compensating wage differentials

My work is often in-between labour economics and organization sociology/psychology. The typical cross-over topic is job quality. In this respect, one hypothesis is 'compensating wage differentials': higher wages compensate not only for schooling and investment, but also for worse working conditions or a heavy workload.

Most often, however, we see that heavy, dangerous work is not that well paid at all. On the other hand, clerical work, which is safe and needs hardly more schooling, makes for more gains. This seems to run counter to the idea of compensating wage differentials.

However, we're mixing up effects. White collar workers are most often found in sectors where higher rents can be distributed. And if not, then companies have to compete for these employees with those sectors. What we will find is that within each occupation - at least in Belgium - and within companies, there actually is fine tuning of wages based on work demands. So yes, compensating wage differentials do exist, but they are not the dominant factor: schooling and market demand are more important. This is why wages correlate with better working conditions.

A model of job quality including wage would therefore stem from a wage equation including job quality.

Wage = Schooling + Ability + DemandShift (national income) - SupplyShift (average schooling) - Job Quality

A crash course in statistics

I recently managed to explain most of statistics (no, seriously) in about an afternoon using the first chapter of Intermediate Statistics: A Conceptual Course. (Sage, Pelham, B. W. (2012)) and three graphs*. After  many years of working with statistics, I actually believe it should be that easy. Also, at work, I have seen total novices use stats professionally in a matter of weeks. It is simply not that hard!
Of course, I'm not talking about assumptions, time series, endogeneity, robust standard errors, and everything that gets your stats right. I refer to what's needed to understand and report test that will be close enough. After all, a complex GMM regression with bootstrapped standard errors still return a regression coefficient and significance levels.
This would be the content of such a course:

1. Samples and inferential statistics
2. Average and variance
3. The normal distribution (probability, significance)
4. Chi2 (test and distribution)
5. Correlations and odds ratios
6. Regression (linear and nonlinear effects)
7. Factor analysis
8. Cluster analysis (similarity)

* One with linear and quadratic relations (for correlations and multiple regression), one with a factor score from two dimensions (also based on correlation), and one with clusters on a plot (similarity).

Start to SAS

I hated SAS for years. Because I believe the language is plain ugly, overcomplicated and unintuitive. The main pain: the fact that any DATA or PROC step (what's the difference anyway?) has a closed structure. Also, it's slow. For trial and error programming, SAS is to avoid. I still believe that.

But, sometimes, you just lack the RAM to work in beautiful languages like Stata or R. So you need to use the statistical WMD. To speed up work, there's this golden tip: compress the data sets (compress=binary). More on this here:
http://heuristically.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/make-sas-faster-data-set-compression/

Selection bias

Job quality improves during crisis, wages rise.

Selection bias.

Bad, low wage jobs disappear.

Minimum wages - a logical ground

The economic literature on minimum wages is immense. I won't address this here. Yet there is one simple argument for minimum wages: there exists some kind of wage that is the necessary minimum for a worker to reproduce the workforce. It makes no sense to pay anyone below the level of what is necessary to raise a child. If you did, in one generation your economy would be doomed. This has happened before, as is documented in Marx' Capital.

Of course, if one's market price is below the minimumwage, subsidies may be an option to get this person employed, lowering effectively the taxpayers income.

Here's a random newspaper opinion on the matter: http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles/4571/half-of-recovery-jobs-offer-low-wages-so-raise-them#.UdFhfzsqz64.

PGF/TikZ

For a while now I was wondering how on earth those neat vector graphics in textbooks are made. I remember my professor of international economics producing graphs in CorelDraw, which is not the state of the art software I had expected.

Because I'm studying distributions at the moment, I was looking for a LaTeX bell shaped curve. I found the GPF/TikZ package and boy, this is what I needed for so long! Within TeX/LaTeX, it's a fairly recent addition. Its predecessor is PStricks, a postscript based graphical language that can't live in a PDF world.

Unlike much of the LaTeX manuals, the TikZ documentation is very instructive and even starts with 80 pages of tutorials. By the way, up to date manuals can always be found at:

http://texdoc.net/pkg/<packagename>

Reinhart-Rogoff

The best joke in decades is the Reinhart-Rogoff paper in the American Economic Review 2010 special issue (this). Not so much because they messed up stats - everybody does - but because they wouldn't leave their stance. No doubt the couple is more than twice as smart as I am, maybe that's why it's hard to admit. Here's a summary, and this is the Herndon Ash Pollin revelation paper.

I quote some guy called Dennis Schminke on the Wall Street Journal online:

"I spent 29 years of a 38-year career with a major US corporation performing operational and financial analyses. Much of that time included review of the work of peers and subordinates. When PC's and spreadsheets first came along in the early 1980's, the trouble began. My experience...if it's on a spreadsheet, there is a good chance there are errors, especially in the hands of inexperienced or careless users. And all we did with our error is cost our company money. We did not blow up the economy or cause trillion$ to be spent chasing an environmental rabbit."

Anyway, it seems that the US does far worse than thought, if you check alternative stats. 

Counting lines of code in multiple files

Ever wondered how much work you put in a project? The best way to operationalize is to count (obviously) the number of lines in your code. I'm aware that this is a relative measure: some people need more lines, but you may compare different projects.

I found the following line to type in MS DOS Prompt that counts lines within each of a series of files:

for %G in (*.do) do find /c /v "_+_" %G

Where *.do are the syntax files of the project in the present working directory. You still have to sum all output manually though.

Thanks to Marten Braten.

Labels in Stata

The thing with labels in Stata is that help label doesn't tell you about ... labelbook. Labelbook is just great, not only in itself, as it is not much better than a sequens of describe var and label varlabel(var), but because there is the uselabel command that turns a label into a editable dataset. This is very handy indeed, for example when you want to merge labelnames into a dataset. I used to go with workarounds collapsing the variable and an encoded form, but that's unpractical.

A few nice standard options in stata is to prefix the code before a label and to set labels in several languages. I've programmed my way around using macros, but now it seems it shouldn't have done that.

When searching for labelbook - because I knew it existed in some form - I installed varlab, rensheet, and varutil. The first two seem utterly useless, the third one does not have a central help file, it is rather a collection of commands writting by Nick J. Cox, so certainly very valuable.

Another tongue for BibLaTeX

This is a post in English, about getting LaTeX to speak Dutch. As such, it may be interesting for other rare languages.

In my last post I discussed the awkward natbib package. That was pretty bad. Now natbib is actually the old fashioned way of referencing. The advantage: it does the job for simple tasks. The disadvantage: everything else. So here's the hip new way of referencing: biblatex.

Yes, I'm being a cynic here. It's a big mess again. But for all of you who like a decent walkthrough, here you are.

Compiling BibTex

First of all, biblatex relies on the biber code, not bibtex. This means that you have to reset your editor to instruct biber where it asks for the bibtex path. Obvious? Not at all. I use TexMaker.

• On a Windows machine: options > configure TM > commands > bibtex %
• On the Mac: same, ending in > usr/texbin/bibtex % (or something like that. No .aux!)

Next, you'll need a sequens of parsing. I do this, repeating step 2 and 3 twice if it doesn't work the way I expected.

1. pdflatex
2. bibtex
3. pdflatex
4. view pdf

Note that you can define the parsing sequens as a user command in TexMaker/TexStudio.

Citing in line and bibliography

Ok, so let's turn back to your .tex file. You'll basically need this syntax in the preamble (before \begin{document}:

\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=apa, natbib=true]{biblatex}
\DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}
%\addbibresource{/Users/username/folder/database.bib} %MAC
\addbibresource{D:/folder/database.bib} %PC

There's no need to specify backend=biber in the biblatex options, yet it does no harm. The standard style is numeric, an alternative is authoryear-comp, or you can follow some journal style, like the APA in this case. Because of the biblatex-apa call here, we need babel, csquotes and \DeclareLanguageMapping. You can change american for a language of your choice, such as dutch, german or french. Do this everywhere it appears in this block of syntax. Do not use multiple languages. This is a shame, as many non-English authors may want to quote in English. Well, you can't.

In the body of your text, after \begin{document} you use the biblatex commands \cite, \textcite and \parencite, or the old natbib commands \cite, \citet and \citep for reasons of compatibility or demands from the publisher. To make the latter work, I specified the option natbib=true. there are a number of other options, such as the suppression of urls and ISBN or DOI numbers, you may want to add.

Before \end{document}, you put \printbibliography. This generates a bibliography, with appropriate translation: 'october' (EN) becomes 'oktober' (NL) in datas, 'references' becomes 'referenties' as heading, etc.

It took me a full day to find this out. I hope you found this post quick enough to keep some time for the real work.

End note

If along the way you get stuck, three things you may want to do:

• Update your editor and your packages. Use TexLive. It's a fat ugly program, but it's made to be updated (the program you need is texutility on OS X and tl-tray-menu on windows)
• Restart your editor. Sometimes it remembers old lines for no reason.
• Erase all latex files except the database (.bib), the text (.tex) and maybe the pdf to save your ass if you miss out on the first two.

BibTeX (natbib)

The much praised reference program BibTeX is an essential part of all academic LaTeX work. It took me some time to understand what it does. You should keep the following sequens in mind:

• First you process an .aux file from you .tex text using LaTeX (i.e. compile > LaTeX)
• That thing is full of code you need to parse through BibTeX to turn the reference fields into references (i.e. compile > BibTeX)
• Doing each step twice may be a good idea to get cross references right
• Next, you parse again using LaTeX
• Finally, you parse the whole thing using pdfLaTeX, to get a pdf (it's a miracle...)

You will agree with me that this is a very cumbersome operation. It is one of the reasons I would recommend using Zotero with a word processor plugin, if you don't really need LaTeX.

But it gets worse. This is how you set up your .tex file.

• In the preamble, so before \begin{document}, you need to load the BibTeX package. The old and safe way is \usepackage{natbib}. It seems there is a new and more flexible BibTeX connection called biblatex. So you heard it right: natbib won't let you make bibliographies for chapter, for example. Whence the praise, I wouldn't know.
• Also in the preamble, although some write it elsewhere, you need to mention the bibliography style. It is \bibliographystyle{plainnat}. In some sciences, this is just plain, and for some journals this will be a specific style. You can't modify this, as the .sty files with the definition are very hard to decypher. LaTeX guys would say: 'Why would you?' Honestly, because I like simple languages. I use Stata instead of SAS, and that's why.
• Obviously, in the standard format, you'll want your bibliography at the end. That's where you'll have it, just type \bibliography{library path}. Library path may be just the name of the library if it's in the same folder, but if you have a copy of your Zotero or Mendeley library at a fixed place, you should give the full path, and beware not to have spaces in it. Also, change backslash for slashes. Usability, you know?

Having gone through all that, you may want to start quoting. Luckily, that's the good part. You need not click any buttons, just type \cite{ and you have a list of labels to choose from. The handy thing is the AutoZotBib plugin for Zotero simply labels entries with the name of the first author, the first word of the title and the year. So it's pretty easy to call in your references. There's a few elegant options to quote:

• \citep{ : this numbers references, if you like that. If you care less about names, do it wiki-style.
• \citeauthor{ : obviously, you'll just get the author
• \citeyear{ : well... you get it

So in sum, it's a pain in the ass, but it works.

One note: you may have weird characters in your references, like Swedish names. You know that LaTeX is English based so you may go down because of your Swedish friends. I haven't really figured out yet, I will in time, but maybe some fontpackage, such as \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}, may help you out. Good Lord, this ain't how it was meant to be.

Good luck referencing!

Economische desinformatie in de pers

Veel opinie schrijf ik hier niet, maar vandaag doen we het toch. Ik blader even door De Morgen - online natuurlijk:

30 januari 2013: "Inflatie daalt sterk na aanpassing berekening"
Men vergelijkt waarschijnlijk de jaar-op-jaar consumptieprijsindex van januari en december. Dat soort dingen durft al eens flucturen, wat kan te wijten zijn aan de daling van december op januari dit jaar of een omgekeerde beweging vorig jaar. De meest waarschijnlijke verklaring van een terugval van het prijspeil is ... crisis, terugval van de vraag. De winterkoopjes zijn geen succes geweest, de spaarquote stijgt, Alexander De Croo is minister van pensioenen geworden, ... wat moet men nog meer hebben om te wanhopen?

Is het dan onmogelijk dat de 'methodologisch' wijzigingen aan de index een impact hebben gehad? Wat mij betreft, op dit moment: inderdaad. Lonen worden gebaseerd op basis van een drie maandelijks voortschrijdend gemiddelde van de 'sociale index' of gezondheidsindex. Soms zijn de maten nog exotischer. Die aanpassing gebeurt enkel bij het overschrijden van de spilindex (een verschil van 2 procent op de index ten opzichte van de vorige aanpassing), of op gezette tijdstippen. Dat is niet noodzakelijk januari. Maar zelfs dan kan de mindere indexering van de lonen pas een effect hebben op de prijzen in februari, want lonen worden meestal op het eind van de maand betaald. Tenzij men nu al denkt geld over te hebben. Het is allemaal eerder koffiedik kijken dan wetenschap.

7 februari 2013 "België hoog maar stabiel op 'Big Mac'-index"
Het tij is blijkbaar echt gekeerd, want Big Mac's worden niet duurder. Wel in Italië, en dat is nefast voor de export. Tja... Ik wist niet dat onze Big Mac's uit Italië kwamen. Enfin, lachen met de Italianen, ze vragen er ook om, maar dit is opnieuw meer infotainment dan iets anders.

14 februari "Lonen in België stegen 5,1 procent meer dan bij buren"
We gaan dat Technisch Verslag dan eens lezen, maar het gaat waarschijnlijk over de loonkost, en niet de lonen. Hoe dan ook is het eigenaardig, want de loonstijging zelf (gemeten met de ICL) is in België bij de laagste van Europa en zit serieus onder de productiviteitsstijging. Hoe komt het dan dat de loonkost sterker stijgt? Belastingen zijn één ding, maar compositie-effecten spelen ook een rol: als meer Belgen in een goede job terechtkomen - in vergelijking met het buitenland - dan zal ons relatieve loonpeil ook stijgen. Is dit een concurrentiehandicap? Niet noodzakelijk. Het kan zijn dat er veel lageloonjobs verdwijnen, maar dit kan niet het gevolg zijn van de loonevolutie want die is lager dan elders (enfin, Duitsland doet nog slechter). Er is dus een verandering van de economie, richting jobs voor hoger opgeleiden, en dat willen we toch?

Algoritme voor een longitudinale, representatieve steekproef

Nemen we twee types steekproeven:

• Longitudinaal: steekproef in jaar t, eenheden opgevolgd door de tijd
• Cross-sectioneel: steekproef in jaar t, steekproef in jaar t+1, t+2, ...

Men zou denken dat deze benaderingen onverzoenbaar zijn. Nochtans is er een algoritme dat toelaat steeds representatief te blijven, én over longitudinale gegevens te beschikken.

Dit voorbeeld kan toegepast worden op de selectie van werknemers, waar de populatie afhankelijk is van de werkloosheid.

Jaar t

Men neemt een steekproef, bijvoorbeeld 25% van de populatie.

Jaar t+1

Er is uitstroom uit de populatie. Dit is geen probleem: aangezien de steekproef aselect is verwachten we dat de sample een gelijke uitstroom heeft. We behouden eenvoudigweg de cases uit jaar t.

Er is ook instroom. Hieruit moeten we opnieuw 25% gaan selecteren.

Jaar t+2

Uitstroom en instroom zullen zich telkens herhalen zoals in jaar t+1.

Er is ook herinstroom in de populatie. Dit betekent voor onze steekproef dat we alle ooit geselecteerde eenheden moeten opvolgen, en opnieuw opnemen als ze terug in de populatie komen. Zij blijven namelijk altijd 25% van het gelijkaardig segment (de herinstroom) vertegenwoordigen. De steekproef blijft dus representatief.

Coding sectors based on NACE rev 1.1 and NACE rev. 2

Below is a broad categorisation of the NACE activities in four groups:

1. Primary sector and construction
2. Manufacturing and energy (including water, waste and recycling)
3. Services and entertainment
4. Public sector, education and health (including libraries)

The syntax below can be used in Stata straight away:

Based on NACE rev. 1.1

gene s_industryR1 = .
replace s_industryR1 = 1 if y10_nace_rev1 >= 1 & y10_nace_rev1 <= 14 // primary sector + construction
replace s_industryR1 = 1 if y10_nace_rev1 == 45 // primary sector + construction
replace s_industryR1 = 2 if y10_nace_rev1 >= 15 & y10_nace_rev1 <= 41 // manufacturing + energy ressources
replace s_industryR1 = 2 if y10_nace_rev1 == 90 // manufacturing + energy ressources
replace s_industryR1 = 3 if y10_nace_rev1 >= 50 & y10_nace_rev1 <= 74 // services + entertainment
replace s_industryR1 = 3 if y10_nace_rev1 >= 91 & y10_nace_rev1 <= 97 // services + entertainment
replace s_industryR1 = 4 if y10_nace_rev1 >= 75 & y10_nace_rev1 <= 85 // PEH
replace s_industryR1 = 4 if y10_nace_rev1 == 99 // PEH

Based on NACE rev. 2

gene s_industryR2 = .
replace s_industryR2 = 1 if y10_nace_rev2 >= 1 & y10_nace_rev2 <= 9 // primary sector + construction
replace s_industryR2 = 1 if y10_nace_rev2 >= 41 & y10_nace_rev2 <= 43 // primary sector + construction
replace s_industryR2 = 2 if y10_nace_rev2 >= 10 & y10_nace_rev2 <= 39 // manufacturing + energy ressources
replace s_industryR2 = 3 if y10_nace_rev2 >= 45 & y10_nace_rev2 <= 82 // services + entertainment
replace s_industryR2 = 3 if y10_nace_rev2 >= 92 & y10_nace_rev2 <= 98 // services + entertainment
replace s_industryR2 = 3 if y10_nace_rev2 == 90 // services + entertainment
replace s_industryR2 = 4 if y10_nace_rev2 >= 84 & y10_nace_rev2 <= 88 // PEH
replace s_industryR2 = 4 if y10_nace_rev2 == 91 // PEH
replace s_industryR2 = 4 if y10_nace_rev2 == 99 // PEH

Info on the box: http://www.quackit.com/html/codes/horizontal_scroll.cfm

Global Labour Column (ILO)

Short, insightful articles on work. Well worth reading!

http://column.global-labour-university.org/

European Federation of Employee Share Ownership (EFES)

http://www.efesonline.org/

Doesn't have a lot to do with stats, besides the fact that it is quite an interesting subject. Typically, socialist trade unions oppose to the idea of employee ownership, which however contradicts the standard Marxist claim of employees ruling the factories. Strange fellows.