Farrell's closes three locations

The Sacramento store, the Mission Viejo store, and the Rancho Cucamonga store all closed. I hope it is indeed just property issues as suggested in the news stories and not signs of a broader decline, though the fact that they also removed all the franchising information from the website suggests that more is going on.

I had lunch at the Sacramento store when I was in the area to give a seminar at UC-Davis. I had a great time but it did not seem like the most auspicious location. I had also been to the Rancho Cucamonga store.

Hat tip on the first two closures: Chuck MacDonald (who was an assistant manager at Farrell's Southcenter in Seattle when I was working there)

Movie: Suicide Squad

So I thought this was the worst movie I have seen in a couple of years, but not one of the worst of all time. My young companion, however, enjoyed it very much indeed.

A.O. Scott takes a (more positive than I expected) middle road, in another very snarky review. He is certainly correct that the best bits are Harley Quinn and the Will Smith character but, really, Will Smith should fire his agent over this.

Recommended only if the nine-year-old is making the decision about which movie to see.

New working paper on teacher unions

The Long-run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining
Michael Lovenheim (Website), Alexander Willén

CESifo Working Paper No. 5977 (July 2016)

Abstract:

This paper presents the first analysis of the effect of teacher collective bargaining on long-run labor market and educational attainment outcomes. Our analysis exploits the different timing across states in the passage of duty-to-bargain laws in a difference-in-difference framework to identify how exposure to teacher collective bargaining affects the long-run outcomes of students. Using American Community Survey (ACS) data linked to each respondent’s state of birth, we examine labor market outcomes and educational attainment for 35-49 year olds. Our estimates suggest that teacher collective bargaining worsens the future labor market outcomes of students: living in a state that has a duty-to-bargain law for all 12 grade-school years reduces earnings by $800 (or 2%) per year and decreases hours worked by 0.50 hours per week. The earnings estimate indicates that teacher collective bargaining reduces earnings by $199.6 billion in the US annually. We also find evidence of lower employment rates, which is driven by lower labor force participation, as well as reductions in the skill levels of the occupations into which workers sort. The effects are driven by men and nonwhites, who experience larger relative declines in long-run outcomes. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we demonstrate that collective bargaining leads to sizable reductions in measured cognitive and non-cognitive skills among young adults. Taken together, our results suggest laws that support collective bargaining for teachers have adverse long-term labor market consequences for students.

You can find the paper here.

Assorted links

1. The map of (heavy) metal

2. A wise piece from Thomas Friedman on Hillary Clinton

3. Deeply horrifying video of the 1996 democrat convention, featuring Hillary as a Stepford wife.

4. I agree with John Cochrane (and by extension the marginal revolutionaries) on NSF. Data is a public good, summer ninths are not. NSF should just be funding data, and maybe grad students.

Hat tip on #1 to Stephane Mahuteau and on #2 to the deputy dean, who denies being the unnamed colleague responsible for #3.

Book: Japan 1941

Hotta, Eri. 2013. Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy. New York: Knopf.

This book presents a political history from a skeptical Japanese perspective of the period leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. The history gets denser as the day of infamy gets closer in time. I found the book fascinating as I knew essentially nothing about the internal politics of Japan in the interwar period. The book makes the case that a combination of cultural (saving face, etc.) and institutional (too much shared responsibility) factors led to a war that, had you somehow collected the honest opinions of the major players, most of the Japanese leadership did not want.

Recommended if the subject is of interest.

Amazon page
Barnes and Noble page

Movie: Cafe Society

It is a Woody Allen movie, so you know what you are getting. I liked it better than A.O. Scott but he does a fine job of laying out the strengths and weaknesses.

He does not mention my favorite line, which is "Socrates says that the unexamined life is not worth living; the examined life is no bargain either."

Recommended if you like Woody Allen movies.

Something to listen to next time you get a jerky referee report

Some clever person should do a version of this using the vast supply of intellectually narrow and misogynist comments from "econjobrumors".

Hat tip: Lizzie