Markets and Stocks
Equity valuations are pressured with the yield on the 10 year Treasury at 3.80%.
According to MasterCard, the Christmas retail season was solid, if not spectacular.
U.S. home prices declined 0.3% in October, the fourth consecutive monthly decline, according to the Case-Shiller national index
All 20 cities in the U.S. index posted monthly declines
Seeking Alpha reports:
It ain't a sleigh and reindeer, but Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) on Friday began deliveries using Prime Air drones in Lockeford, California, and College Station, Texas. Amazon hopes to use feedback from the service to improve its operations, and eventually scale the program nationwide. To fly delivery drones in the U.S., companies have to be approved by the FAA, and the retail behemoth is one of only several firms that has received Part 135 certification.
How it works? Once onboarded, customers can see Prime Air-eligible items on Amazon. They place their order as they normally would and receive an estimated arrival time with a status tracker. For these deliveries, the drone will fly to the designated delivery location, descend to the customer’s backyard, and hover at a safe height. It will then release the package and rise back up to altitude.
"Our aim is to safely introduce our drones to the skies," commented Natalie Banke, spokesperson at Prime Air. "We are starting in these communities and will gradually expand deliveries to more customers over time."
The competition: Alphabet's Wing launched commercial service just north of Dallas in April, and hopes to soon press the button on wide-scale deployment. Walmart's drone delivery program is also available to households in Dallas, Orlando, Phoenix and Tampa, making it possible for customers to get diapers or dinner ingredients delivered in 30 minutes or less. Meanwhile, Uber Eats has promised to ratchet up drone delivery operations in the near future, but until now, the technology has been mainly focused on small-scale trials.
This is all very cool, people are too pessimistic about progress.
Economics
Researchers in NBER working paper 30792 find that:
Almost one third of women worldwide report some form of physical or sexual violence by a partner in their lifetime, yet little is known about the mental health and well-being effects for either victims or their children. We study the costs associated with domestic violence (DV) in the context of Norway, where we can link offenders to victims and their children over time.
Our difference-in-differences framework uses those who will be victimized in the future as controls. We find that a DV report involving the police is associated with large changes in the home environment, including marital dissolution and a corresponding decline in financial resources.
A DV report increases mental health visits by 35% for victims and by 19% for their children in the year of the event, effects which taper off over time for the victim, but not for children.
Victims also experience more doctor visits, lower employment, reduced earnings and a higher use of disability insurance while their children are more likely to receive child protective services and commit a crime. Using a complementary RD design, we find that a DV report results in declines both in children’s test scores and completion of the first year of high school.
The research is not surprising but depressing nevertheless.
Politics
“A pharmaceutical nonprofit was granted priority review from the Food and Drug Administration to make an inexpensive overdose-reversal drug for use without a prescription.
Harm Reduction Therapeutics Inc. said its 3 milligram nasal spray naloxone formulation, called Rivive, had three times higher concentration in the blood of 36 participants than naloxone delivered as a shot. The company said Monday that the FDA gave it a target approval date of April 28. The FDA declined to comment.
HRT said it would give away one-tenth of its product and sell the rest to pharmacies, public-sector employees and groups that work with drug users at-cost, about $18 a dose. HRT said it plans to produce 2 million doses a year.”
Sociology
Marginal Revolution highlights new research on zero sum-negative-defeated- thinking.
Researchers find that a more zero-sum view is strongly correlated with several policy views about the importance of government, the value of redistributive policies, the impact of immigration, and one’s political orientation. We find that zero-sum thinking can be explained by experiences of an individual’s ancestors (parents and grandparents), including the amount of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, the degree of economic hardship they suffered, whether they immigrated to the United States or were exposed to more immigrants, and whether they had experiences with enslavement. These findings underscore the importance of psychological traits, and how they are transmitted inter-generationally, in explaining current political divides in the United States.”
“Respondents living in Utah exhibit the least zero-sum thinking, on average, and respondents living in Montana, Oklahoma and Mississippi exhibit the most. Importantly, there is no significant geographic clustering and the geographic distribution of zero-sum beliefs is not obviously correlated with that of political leanings.
If a respondent was born outside the U.S., then they tend to have a less zero-sum view of the world.
African-Americans have more zero-sum thinking than average, and also this:
Zero-sum thinking is also associated with more redistributive economic policies and a political alignment with the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party.
Trying matters. The defeated don’t try. They prefer to take, not cooperate and “produce.”
The scholars should study zero sum thinking in prison.
Researchers in NBER working paper 30425 summarize.
How malleable is alcohol consumption? Specifically, how much is alcohol consumption driven by the current environment versus individual characteristics? To answer this question, we analyze changes in alcohol purchases when consumers move from one state to another in the United States. We find that if a household moves to a state with a higher (lower) average alcohol purchases than the origin state, the household is likely to increase (decrease) its alcohol purchases right after the move. The current environment explains about two-thirds of the differences in alcohol purchases. The adjustment takes place both on the extensive and intensive margins.