Paycheck Fairness Act is anti-womens' employment

Scheduled to come to a vote in Congress tomorrow, the Paycheck Fairness Act is a bad solution to a statistically trumped-up problem.

The most frequently cited statistic is that women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. However, not all of that gap can be attributed to discrimination.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that comparing male and female full-time workers, men work more hours: 8.2 versus 7.8 hours per day, on average. Just assuming an exactly even hourly rate, we'd expect women to earn 95% of men's total on a yearly basis; however, there are also more women working part-time than men, widening the gap further. Men are also disproportionately likely to die from an injury on the job, as this chart shows.

Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, and Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2012.

But put aside those statistical details. A gap in male-female wages undoubtedly remains, and some of it is probably due to gender-bias and discrimination. What does the Paycheck Fairness Act do to fix that?

The Act would strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which already requires similar workers be paid the same. The new legislation would expand the damages that women can claim in court, and give women more tools to sue their employers if discrimination is suspected.

The new law would result in effectively unlimited liability for a business sued for giving unequal pay. Put yourself in the shoes of a small business owner. Suppose you are considering hiring either a male or female employee for an entry-level position. Suddenly knowing that your business could be shut down if a court decides your payment to the woman is unfair, who would you be more inclined to hire?

Let's think of another group that has been "protected" by sweeping federal legislation. Persons with physical disabilities are given additional tort resources by the Americans with Disabilities Act if it's found that they were treated unfairly. A paper by Acemoglu and Angrist (2001), using reliable econometric techniques, found that employment of disabled people dropped substantially following the ADA's passage. Now, twenty years later, physically disabled persons are unemployed at record levels.

There are obvious weaknesses in the analogy between the Paycheck Fairness Act and Americans with Disabilities Act - women are a larger segment of the population, and aren't physically limited from doing most jobs - but a lesson remains. Creating new protected classes of workers is not always to that group's overall benefit.

Even well-intentioned laws may end up punishing businesses for hiring certain workers, which hurts both individuals and the economy as a whole. The Paycheck Fairness Act is almost certainly dead in the water; even without passage, its political purpose will have been achieved. But, if President Obama and the Democrats want to show they are helping women, a first step is to not shut them out of the labor market.

First Textbook in Social Media Marketing

Blatant self-promotion, but I can't resist.

(c) Cengage Learning 2013.

The book that I helped write is now in print. Find it here. Many thanks to my co-authors as well as the professionals at Cengage Learning for making this possible.

While intended to accompany a college- or graduate-level marketing course, I think this text does a pretty good job of encapsulating the advice that can be found in other prominent trade books, in addition to presenting some original and innovative material (I'm especially proud of Chapter 3). As far as I know, it's the most thorough treatment of social media marketing that can be found in one place. A boon to students and aspiring professionals alike. A magnum opus indeed.

Hyperbole aside, I'm very pleased with how the book turned out. I hope that some other people are able to derive utility from it as well.

Productivity is bad for job growth?

Scanning the news feed for something worthy of being shared with Twitter, I happened across this good news/bad news article from USA Today: Unemployment benefit claims, worker productivity fall. Less benefit claims is a sign that more people are going back to work, although drops in productivity temper optimism about the speed of economic recovery.

Instead, apparently the author of this piece took it be good news/good news, claiming

Weaker productivity growth can help boost hiring if economic growth picks up.

This argument is motivated by the lump of labor fallacy (the idea that there are only so many jobs to be done, so higher productivity will leave more out of work) and a preoccupation with firms as purveyors of jobs rather than producers of products. Both of these ideas are largely discredited among economists.

In reality, productivity growth is the driving factor behind economic expansion. For economic growth to pick up, we need the inputs of production (labor, capital, etc.) to become more productive, not slow down! This allows us to both become richer and create more jobs as a society.

At the micro-level, theory predicts that a firm will not pay a worker more than their marginal product; i.e. if a machinist can produce $50 worth of goods in an hour, a company that pays him/her $51 per hour will be losing money. USA Today misses the irony when going on to claim

consumers have been weighed down by wages that haven't kept pace with inflation.

If that is occurring, it's because worker productivity hasn't kept pace with other factors in the economy. This argument is made in more detail by several recent books: Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen both explore the phenomenon of declining worker productivity, and neither are excited about that decline as a source of new jobs.

Lower productivity means reduced living standards for future Americans. It doesn't even rise to the level of a placebo for our current unemployment woes; generally, placebos are expected to do nothing, not make the problem worse.

Fuzzy Economics and Legal Fees

The New York Times has published several articles in the last two months targeting the American Bar Association. In October, Clifford Winston questioned the need for bar exams and professional licensing. Last week, David Segal wrote "For Law Schools, a Price to Play the A.B.A.’s Way" which blames the ABA's control over law school accreditation for overly high legal fees.In that article, he writes

...The lack of affordable law school options, scholars say, helps explain why so many Americans don’t hire lawyers.

“People like to say there are too many lawyers,” says Prof. Andrew Morriss of the University of Alabama School of Law. “There are too many lawyers who charge $300 an hour. There aren’t too many lawyers who will handle a divorce at a reasonable rate, or handle a bankruptcy at a reasonable rate. But there is no way to be that lawyer and service $150,000 worth of debt.”

This helps explain a paradox: the United States churns out roughly 45,000 lawyers a year, but survey after survey finds enormous unmet need for legal services, particularly in low- and middle-income communities...

This reasoning doesn't make sense to me. It may be true that lawyers are driven to make more money in order to pay off student loans. But, high fees are not the only way to make lots of cash; there is also the low-cost, high-volume strategy (think Walmart). If so much unmet demand for legal services exists, it could be more profitable to charge a lower hourly rate and just work faster or put a little less effort into each case. This wouldn't be practical if the supply of lawyers is artificially restricted, but given the 45,000 new lawyers every year as well as reportedly high numbers of unemployed or idle lawyers, a shortage seems to be unlikely.

Even if the ABA does drive up the cost of law school tuition, that alone can't explain why legal fees are so high. I'd hypothesize that clients pay lawyers a premium wage in order to ensure a high level of effort. As it is hard to monitor an attorney's effort directly, better wages are used as an incentive to keep on the job instead of slacking. In the economics literature, this is referred to as an efficiency wage; the concept has been used to explain why wages remain rigid during periods of high unemployment. That seems to apply quite easily to the legal industry.

I'm sympathetic to the argument for lowering entry barriers to practicing law, but there are other factors at work too which cause lawyer wages to be high. Otherwise, competition in the legal industry would have already driven down prices and serviced the unmet needs in low- and middle-income communities.

Fun Facts about Microsoft Co.

Why would anyone bother reading shareholder reports? They're dry, long-winded, and functionally outdated by the time of arrival, so there's no way to profit from the information. Reasons for reading would have to include boredom, duress, or idle curiosity. It was the latter which led me to the Microsoft Annual Report for 2011. A few interesting facts pulled from that document:

• Microsoft is divided into five segments. The Windows & Windows Live Division gets 75% of its revenue from selling Windows to computer manufacturers, to be pre-installed for end users. The remaining 25% comes from sale of miscellaneous hardware products and online advertising on Windows Live. 
• In the Windows Division, most growth over the last year was business sales (+11%) while consumer purchases went down (-1%). A substantial part of the drop in consumer PC sales was from netbooks (-32%).
• Employee severance expenses were $59 million in 2010 and $330 million in 2009. Why the huge change? Microsoft: "In January 2009, we announced and implemented a resource management program to reduce discretionary operating expenses, employee headcount, and capital expenditures."
• Research and Development costs took up 15% of Microsoft's revenue, or $9.0 billion, in 2011. That investment is well-protected -- by 26,000 U.S. and international patents, and another 36,000 pending.
• Kinect for Xbox 360 is the fastest-selling consumer electronics device; confirmed by Guinness World Records. 
• If you'd bought $100 of Microsoft stock in June 2006, six years later it would be worth $122.71 (compare to $115.61 for the S&P Index, or $157.48 for the Nasdaq Computer Index). 

What, if anything, does this say about the corporation and its future? Microsoft's product focus is split between entertainment/gaming and business services, while the company's prior breadwinner - bundling software with new PCs - is taking a back seat. As stated in a note from their CEO, Steven Ballmer: "increasingly, we will view ourselves as a devices and services company." It sounds closer to Mattel than the Evil Empire. Regardless, Microsoft's diverse selection of both patents and products provides a foothold to compete against intimidating rivals like Google, Apple, and Salesforce.com.

Are minimum wage hikes the answer to recession?

The current economic downturn has caused belt tightening by businesses globally, and much of the hardship has been felt by low-paid workers. In response, many have called for a higher mandated minimum wage. From California and Minnesota to Azerbaijan and Nigeria (just in recent news) the issue has been a political hot-button.

In the economics literature, a consensus has not emerged on whether minimum wages cause unemployment. According to basic economic theory, any binding price floor (e.g. minimum wage laws) will cause a surplus of the good in question. In the labor market, that means unemployment. While politicians and pundits tout the benefits of "a living wage" or the difficulty of living off $8.25 an hour they conveniently ignore those unable to find work as a result. Until relatively recently, this trade-off was at least acknowledged. However, a study conducted by Card and Krueger, which found no impact on the fast food industry in Pennsylvania and New Jersey from a minimum wage increase, fueled a new round of optimism regarding higher price floors on wages. Is economic theory put on hold when discussing the labor market, or is this just too good to be true?

You can read my paper on minimum wages and unemployment here. By comparing state unemployment levels to their unemployment rates in 2008 while controlling for other job-related factors, a positive relationship between minimum wages and unemployment rates was found (it's a riveting read, I promise). It was presented at the SIRC on April 24, 2010.