1. Household Finance: If you'll bear with me I'm going to write about household finance mostly with links to pieces about corporate finance. Corporate finance matters a lot, and it deserves the attention and resources invested in it (Channeling Willie Sutton: why do you write papers about corporate finance? Because that's where the money is). After several hundred years of lots and lots of resources and attention we've pretty much got this thing licked right? Well, maybe not the biggest questions but at least the basic questions like accounting and financial reporting, right? Right?
Here's Warren Buffet complaining about Generally Accepted Accounting (GAAP) rules being applied to his company. And here's an argument from several business school professors that GAAP rules aren't meaningful given changes in the economy--with the enticing tidbit that in many companies having a CPA, in other words having deep familiarity with the rules of corporate finance and accounting, is a disqualification for a senior-level job in the finance department. And here's Buffet again, this time with Jamie Dimon, arguing that quarterly financial reporting is broken.
Lest you think that this is some emerging consensus, here's Felix Salmon arguing they are wrong. Here's Matt Levine arguing they're wrong. And here (via Justin Fox, which we'll return to later) is a whole book about GAAP rules being wrong for entirely different reasons.
So all of this is interesting (OK, maybe not) but what does it have to do with household finance? We haven't even begun investing the kind of resources necessary to really understand household finance, but we act like we have all the important questions licked. Or at least that households should be able to, with a little financial literacy training perhaps, be able to get a grasp on their finances and make consistently sound decisions. The fact is, for the most part, we just don't know what we're talking about when we talk about household finance. Or loss aversion.
2. Digital Finance: In another brief diversion to start off an item, an astute reader pointed out that the way I had been writing about Findex made it seem like the Findex team did not have it's own report on the findings. They do, so click on it.
One read of the both the Global Findex team's report and the CFI report highlighted last week is that the promise of digital finance is largely unfulfilled. But there's still a lot of excitement over the promise in places like Egypt apparently. I found this piece particularly remarkable because I stumbled on it right after reading through the Findex analyses, and all I could think was "I don't think that data means what you think it means." Oh, and the note that moving to digital finance would allow the government to closely inspect everyone's spending habits, wheeee!
There's a different sort of excitement over digital finance in Uganda apparently where the parliament has approved taxing mobile money and social media(?!?). Apparently there was some concern that such taxes would be regressive, but some MPs objected that people shouldn't be exempted from paying taxes just because they were poor. Clearly those people don't read CGD/Vox.
In other CGD news related to digital finance, here's a piece about using blockchain in development projects--or perhaps more on point, *not* using the blockchain for development projects. There's a terrific decision tree graphic in the piece that is worth the click on its own, even though I disagree substantially with one part of it.
3. Firms, Productivity and Labor: Earlier this week I attended two days of the Innovation Growth Lab conference put on by Nesta. A number of interesting papers and research proposals were presented--the session I found most interesting was on the global productivity slowdown. The conclusion I came away with--though this wasn't what any of the papers were about--is that the big policy problem is insufficient labor mobility. And by that I don't mean geographic mobility (though I do think more of that would be great) but more firm-to-firm labor mobility.
But while I was sitting in the research meeting discussing a) whether its possible to boost productivity of small firms, and b) whether the adoption of Toyota Way principles could be an effective proxy for increasing experimentation in firms, this new paper from Tanzania popped up in my Twitter feed via David Evans. It's an experiment introducing Toyota-style problem-solving training for small garment firms--three years after training they find significantly higher profits (though no short-run gains). I can't imagine a paper designed to more efficiently challenge my priors--which are/were a) Toyota has developed an incredibly productive system for sustaining and improving performance, b) it is incredibly hard to improve performance of small businesses.
I mentioned returning to Justin Fox's piece earlier--the column is about how firms behave from a theoretical and empirical perspective, especially how well Friedman's perspective is holding up. It's definitely worth one of your precious Bloomberg-pay-wall-exception clicks (though you may want to open it in an incognito tab anyway). The column will make one more appearance before we're through.
4. Our Algorithmic Overlords: In the interests of time I'm going to hit you with several links and very little commentary. The NY Times Magazine has a feature on differing perspectives on the future of AI among the titans of Silicon Valley. I feel like some very close analog of this piece was done last year but I don't have an AI assistant handy to find it for me.
Here are two new NBER papers on the impact of AI and policy: from Jason Furman and Robert Seamans and from Ajay Agrawal, Josh Gans and Avi Goldfarb.
And two stories about surveillance--of crowds looking for violent behavior, and of Chinese school students looking for boredom.
5. Social Investing: Finally, this week a new Exchange Traded Fund focused on "just" corporations launched--it's a collaboration between hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones II and Goldman Sachs, exactly who you would expect to be arbiters of socially-positive corporate behavior (if only they could have had an actor portraying Milton Friedman at the launch event!). But the methodology for the index is actually quite interesting and the basis for the rankings are remarkably transparent. There are a number of interesting perspectives to read on it. Here's a positive take. A neutral one. And a skeptical one. (And that's why you want to save your Bloomberg clicks)
Here's the last return to that Justin Fox piece because he features one of the greatest faiV-style videos ever: the Stockholm School of Economics choir signing an original composition based on Friedman's view of firm's social responsibilities.
