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Today is February 29th. Given that it comes only once every four years, that would make it a rare birthday. But it is even rarer. As Andrew Leigh and I discovered in our research, the birthrate on this day is about 10% lower than if it was an ordinary Friday. Why? Parents like to move their children’s birthdays off days like this and on to something more regular. Of course, today they might get some resistance from their doctors who don’t want those births pushed on to the weekend, so it isn’t as rare as ‘normal’ leap days. [Thanks to Andrew for the reminder].

Well, I am not a lawyer so my views on iPhone legality expressed here and here need to be taken with a grain of salt. Dale Clapperton who is one of the authors worried about iPhone legality thinks that getting past the ACCC on this one is not a given. Kim Weatherall, who is a lawyer (although not a competition one), says ACCC past behaviour on this stuff indicates otherwise. That said, if the legislation on third line forcing is rarely a barrier, calls for its reform are even more important. After all, think about all of the uncertainty it created this week. And let’s say that Graeme Samuel — a noted gadgetphile — did actually challenge an iPhone introduction plane as it has occurred around the world and that led to delay or no introduction, I think that this is not going to win that section of the Trade Practices Act any friends (except amongst iPhone ‘grey’ market importers that is).

So how does someone pick the wrong side in a standards war? Apparently, by looking to price. Read on.

Tim Harford gave a very engaging talk at Melbourne Business School today to a full house. It is great to see so many students interested in economics that they would voluntarily come to a lunchtime lecture. It bodes well for the world. Also, it looks like Tim didn’t run into the kinds of difficulties that he did with his material in Singapore.

I would also like to thank Tim for his generous plug for my upcoming book (and yes, my daughter’s picture has appeared to make the Financial Times website).

I was thinking more about the discussion in relation to the Clapperton-Corones piece on the legality of the iPhone. My point had been that the only issue that seemed to be salient was Third Line forcing. Clapperton and Corones thought there would be real issues here but I must admit that I couldn’t see it failing a public benefits test in an authorisation before the ACCC; so it would be OK. Put simply, my prediction is that if the iPhone can’t operate like it does around the world in terms of account activation, Apple would not bother with Australia. The ACCC, realising this, would let it go through.

That said, I take Clapperton and Corones’ point that authorisation would be required. That process is public and a quick look at the ACCC website doesn’t appear to show any application by Apple. This leads me to conclude that the iPhone will not be gracing our shores any time soon.

Dan Hamermesh and Joel Slemrod claim they have a problem in: “The Economics of Workaholism: We Should Not Have Worked on this Paper.”

A large literature examines the addictive properties of such behaviors as smoking, drinking alcohol, gambling and eating. We argue that for some people addictive behavior may apply to a much more central aspect of economic life: working. Although workaholism raises some of the same health-related concerns as other addictions, compared to most of the more familiar addictions it is more likely to be a problem of higher-income individuals and is more likely to generate negative spillovers onto individuals around the workaholic. Using the Retirement History Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that high-income, highly educated people exhibit behavior that is consistent with workaholism with regard to retiring–they are more likely to postpone earlier plans for retirement. The theory and evidence suggest that the presence of workaholism calls for a more progressive income tax system than otherwise, although other more targeted policies may be part of optimal policy.

Really, more taxation? Do we really think it is fair that we punish Paris Hilton because some of us are working too hard.

I had thought that this US Presidential election campaign was looking very much like the second last season of the West Wing. Apparently, I am not alone in that thought. Interestingly, this report suggests that that might be no accident as the script for this primary was written prior to those West Wing episodes. I guess this is how far audience testing has gone that they run it as a TV show before the real thing. Of course, now we only need a nuclear power plant melt-down around October and it will be eerie indeed.

So it appears that broadcasters have worked out that to compete with DVRs but have ads you need to have on-demand programming but without the ability to skip ads (NYT). The technology is basically a cable box that allows you to watch programs when you want (so you can time shift) but that wont allow you to skip ads. It is basically what they wanted Tivo to be but could never get that as people like to record to skip boring bits of programs as well.

What this will do will cut in to the DVR market for people who time shift shows they ‘must see’ but otherwise casually watch TV. But for those people who really hate ads, this will not be very appealing except that it will bring down DVR prices.

But the question I have is this: if this is such a good idea, why not put ads on iTunes TV programs, disable fast forwarding on those programs, and offer them for free? Sure, there are differences in the technology (e.g., ease of watching on a normal TV) and local advertising is impacted but commercially what is the big deal?

News reports today that network locking of Apple’s iPhone might be illegal in Australia. That surprised me but the newspaper cited the following:

“The iPhone is breaking new ground in using technology to restrict customer’s choice in technology markets,” said Queensland University of Technology (QUT) law researcher Dale Clapperton.

The finding comes from an analysis of the iPhone under Australia’s competition laws by Dr Clapperton and fellow QUT law expert Professor Stephen Corones, published in the QUT Law and Justice Journal.

So I looked up the article (click here for it). And right in the abstract it said:

The new Apple iPhone contains technological locks which tie the iPhone to the mobile telephony services of a particular third-party mobile carrier, a new development in technological tying, and much more likely to be unlawful in Australia.

“More likely than what?” Apparently, the iPod and tying to the iTunes Music Store. So much for concerns about the iPhone’s legality. The news.com.au site should have said: “little concern about iPhone’s legality.”

What the Clapperton-Corones article argues is that there might be an economic issue with locking (not a legal one):

Where the carrier has not subsidised the cost of the phone, there seems to be no legitimate pro-competitive justification for locking the phone to the services of that carrier, especially where that locking is permanent and not just for the duration of the initial contract.

Well, the jury is out on that piece of economic analysis. All of the current intelligence about the iPhone suggests that carriers are subsidising its cost and paying Apple some revenue share. What the authors are confusing that with are phone subsidies to consumers — although these are recovered through network charges so the subsidy is largely an illusion.

The only serious legal issue might come in relation to Third Line Forcing which says that one company cannot sell a product that makes it a condition of sale that the consumer purchase a product from another company. However, Apple need only sell the iPhone through a carrier’s retailers and it is likely to be fine. In any case, it can obtain permission from the ACCC for any arrangement it might propose.

The article indicates that there might be other anti-competitive issues associated with the iPhone. But someone would have to ask if this arrangement were to lessen competition in any market. There are other smart-phones so Apple isn’t a monopolist there. There is lots of network competition and in the US the iPhone hasn’t given AT&T something that has weakened competition in mobile competition.

Personally, I think locking the iPhone is a poor business decision but it doesn’t look like it is one that will violate competition laws.

Like movies? Attracted by box office receipts? Like graphs even more? Check out the NYT.

Apparently, the Dallas Fed in the US is having an essay competition for high school students with the title “Economics at the movies.” OK, let me add some pointers for this interested: for game theory, look to House of Games and, the classic, The Princess Bride (both from 1987). You can also look for real estate economics in the Superman movies or some poor commercialisation strategy in Mission Impossible II.

I guess the irony would not be lost on anyone of 2000 jobs to be cut at Centrelink (the social security office). Images of people walking from behind the counter to stand in a queue in front of it come to mind. But in actuality, with a booming economy, it should be a positive sign if Centrelink’s activities are contracting.

But the broader issues is that the government faces big challenges in its attempt to reduce public service costs. In that respect, some policies enacted by the previous government stand out as sore thumbs. I speak, of course, of the baby bonus. That payment already costs around $1 billion per year and in July is set to add several hundred million more to the bill as it jumps to $5,000. And for what? At its best, the baby bonus was just a vote buying exercise and a failed one at that. At its worst, it is an attempt to increase the population; something that is misplaced because there is a cheaper alternative — immigration. (On this point, I note that the IPA’s Chris Berg is in agreement).

The Rudd government has, thusfar, been silent on the issue of the baby bonus. Prior to the election, they were set on keeping it but it never was a core promise for them. I must admit that I can’t for the life of me imagine a Labor government slashing public sector jobs while at the same time increasing the baby bonus. Leave aside the obvious disruption that is going to occur in maternity hospitals in the last week of June and first week of July, the increment to the baby bonus is unjustified. My hope is that it will be frozen in the May budget.

But in reality, we need to be rid of it. The review of changes to maternity and paternity leave will provide an obvious opportunity. Let’s hope the government takes advantage of it.

The Garnaut report has strongly recommended fast action on climate change. This stands in contrast to usual approaches that are strong on the need for action but cautious on when that action should take place; arguing that there is value in waiting for more information and to ‘get the policy parameters’ right. It seems that, for all sorts of reasons that I won’t go into here, time has run out.

John Quiggin and I wrote a paper last year that addressed policy implementation. In it, we argued that there was no reason not to move quickly in some sectors. We singled out automotive because, even if you don’t worry about climate change, we need to get the prices right there anyway. And we also targeted electricity because grafting emissions trading onto the existing market would make sense and you would begin to get investment in a critical sector heading in the right direction, right now. After reading through the interim Garnaut report, I am more convinced than ever that we should begin tackling climate change sector by sector with policies that can be integrated at a later date.

You students out there, see, even our politicians get hot and sweaty about plain old economic terms. Yesterday’s hot bed was the ‘non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment’ or NAIRU. For the uninitiated, let me quote from my favourite economics textbook.

[The NAIRU] is the level of unemployment that does not result in increases in the inflation rate.

In theory, the Reserve Bank can go to town in squeezing the money supply to fight inflation and it won’t effect the NAIRU but it will impact on short-term unemployment. And so what is the level of the NAIRU at the moment? Well, inflation is accelerating, so it is higher than our current unemployment rate.

But there is something very important here: the NAIRU does not change with current discretionary policy variables. It relates to structural factors. So when Malcolm Turnbull asks this question:

“If the treasurer regards that (NAIRU) rate to be higher than 4.1 per cent, how many Australian jobs does he believe should be sacrificed to achieve it?”

a possible answer could be: none; at least if we are patient. Not that it is easy to do, but the government could try and put in place programs that will eventually reduce the NAIRU. Indeed, it appears to have fallen since I was an economics student and gets lower with every edition of my favourite textbook. The problem is that until that is done, our inflation rate will stay high and maybe get higher if unemployment stays down. Near as I can tell, that is what the Treasurer actually said.

The one thing we can do with the NAIRU is probably put a figure on it (or at least a range) by looking at how fast inflation has accelerated and decelerated in the past. That is why the concept is useful.

The New York Times talks about the iPhone ‘smuggling racket’. Apparently, it is estimated that 1.3 million iPhones have left the US and are being used on non-approved networks. This is a fair chunk of the 3.7 million Apple have said they sold last year.

This is regarded as some sort of blow to Apple.

For Apple, the sale of iPhones to people who ship them to China is a source of revenue. But the company is still losing out, because its exclusive deals with phone service providers bring in revenue after the phone is sold. If the phones were activated in the United States, Apple would receive as much as $120 a year per user from AT&T, analysts say.

Exactly, what is the cost again? “If they were activated in the US.” The point is that they won’t and never will be activated in the US. This can’t be a loss to Apple. The loss is that if it wants to do deals with mobile carriers internationally like it did with AT&T, it may face some push-back because the lead users there are already using.

Apple have clearly stuffed up here and it is this: they could have offered an unlocked phone — potentially at double the current price — and have achieved lots of sales. Every other Apple product gets sold around the world instantly and their global marketing campaigns work. They mis-judged the iPhone, got stuck in what must be some horrific contracts that didn’t take into account a ‘success contingency.’ We are all paying the price.

Moreover, what sort of ‘smuggling’ is this anyway? At best, it is a ‘grey’ market as Luke Froeb argues but there is no sense in which international customers are cheating Apple by buying a product not available in their countries.

I must admit that when I picked up Tim Harford’s latest book, The Logic of Life, I wondered whether there was really room for another popular economics book. In the wake of the success of Freakonomics, we had seen Tyler Cowen’s self-help book, Steve Landsburg’s ode to the counter-intuitive, Robert Frank’s collection of student analyses, Ian Ayres Supercrunchers, and even Tim Harford’s first book, The Undercover Economist. There apparently is even going to be a book on economics and parenting. Was there room for something new?

Well, it turns out that there was. The Logic of Life picks up where Freakonomics left off — that is, recent research into interest economic phenomena that does not come from the ‘lab’ of Steve Levitt. It is a series of essays around some themes including poker tournaments, divorce, workplace politics, neighbourhood effects, racism, geographic agglomeration, voting and long-term economic growth. But the research documented is hardly the dry stuff that you might normally expect. Instead, it covers the interesting — also known as ‘freaky’ — topics that have caused economics to adorn the newspapers and blogs with surprising regularity.

In that respect, there is nothing new in this book. What is new is how well exposited it is. Moreover, there is nothing ecclectic about Harford’s choice of topics. It is exactly what we would students to be reading to understand the power of economics using examples of recent research. The research is given context and it is explained in a way that has the important quailty of ‘not being wrong’ and being appropriately qualified. With this book, Tim Harford has established himself as perhaps the world’s leading economic journalist. If you read one economics book this year among the stack recently produced, this would be it.

But there is another thing that comes from this book. The research documented shows an interesting trend. Chicago economists coming up with theories (in some cases decades ago) that are being tested by younger East Coast economists. What has caused this in the sociology of academic economics is an interesting question that i have no answer for.

Finally, a reminder to all Melbourne residents out there that Tim Harford will be speaking at MBS in just a couple of weeks time. Click here to register.

In his Dear Economist column this week, Tim Harford counsels someone who let his sister take a 30 percent share of his mortgage but now wants to have more than 70 percent of the equity. Harford correctly thinks that that is a bit rich as he got to actually live in the house. If anything, the equity should flow the other way.

What was interesting was why they entered into this arrangement. Apparently, his sister wanted a stake in the property market as a hedge for some future full entry into it; say, when her income rose further. Of course, buying a share of a specific property is risky in this regard. Better to buy some share of a residential property fund. In Australia, such funds exist now thanks to Rismark of which I am an advisor. That way you can access the property market as a hedge and avoid the family disputes that require public advice from economists.

Earlier this week in the Australian Financial Review I claimed that:

Of course, this belies the fact that our Trade Practices legislation gave Telstra a route to receive more certainty than what the ACCC might be saying to it and publicly. It could have offered an undertaking that would have been subject to public evaluation and Court oversight. Such an undertaking could have granted it an ‘access holiday’ as, now, ACCC Commission Stephen King and I termed it some years ago. Indeed, the Productivity Commission in its review of telecommunications regulation saw access holidays as a good means of encouraging investment in new services while preserving future competitive potential. But neither Telstra nor any other company that whines of the uncertain regulatory environment has ever taken that route.

In a letter in today’s AFR, Henry Ergas disagrees. He argues several things. First, that telecommunications companies have put in prior to the investment undertakings to obtain regulatory certainty. The G9 were knocked back but Telstra (with respect to digitisation of the coax cable network) was actually given an exemption by the ACCC but it was knocked back by the Australian Competition Tribunal. The problem is that the Tribunal found that Telstra shouldn’t get the exemption because the investment concerned would have proceeded anyway. Thus, if you want an access holiday you have to demonstrate that you actually need it.

That said, my claim in the article was way too strong. Telstra have put in such an undertaking it is just that the Courts found they didn’t need it. They did find, however, that such undertakings could be given and so access holidays were possible. So my overall conclusion that Telstra had the opportunity to do this with respect to ADSL2+ remains; that is, of course, unless they were going to do it anyway.

Second, Ergas argues that access holidays do not have explicit treatment in the Trade Practices Act. Also true. But that doesn’t mean they are not possible (as the Australian Competition Tribunal has already affirmed). We just don’t know precisely how they will operate in practice because it hasn’t been done. Actually, to be sure, I would prefer them to have explicit treatment and to be a key part of our access regulatory laws while I have lobbied and provided submissions extensively on this, no telecommunications company or other infrastructure provider has publicly come out in support of them (at least not that I am aware of) or something similar (aside of course from throwing away all of the access laws but this is rather extreme). So, all this adds up to me to suggest that perhaps there really isn’t the investment incentives problem caused by regulation that elsewhere companies whine, yes, whine, about.

Third, in my opinion, one of the problems with the G9 undertaking was that it didn’t respect the fact that a ULLS scheme was already in place and that it wasn’t fair on the provider in that case (Telstra) to have it supplanted. Upgrades are different from greenfields investment.

Finally, thanks for the advice on where to spend my time, but I think I will always have a moment to snipe at Telstra; after all, in broadband, I am one of their oldest residential customers (celebrating 10 years this year) and have one of their fastest connections (clocked at 40Mbps) and part with thousands of dollars a year to them. But other than that, there is lots of fodder to snipe about.

Next week’s episode of Lost is intriguingly entitled “The Economist.”

Also, apparently there is a new movie about our favourite archaeology professor. (Trailer now available now available)

In today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, an article about Wharton’s method of allocating slots to scarce classes.

Wharton auctions spots to its M.B.A. students, allowing them to bid for their classes. They don’t use real money; instead, students are each given 5,000 points when they enroll and 1,000 more for every credit they earn. An average course might sell for a few hundred points while the most sought-after ones can top 10,000. …

But Wharton takes it one step further, allowing students to sell their courses (for points) to other students. It’s all done through a Web site. Buyers and sellers are anonymous, so buddies can’t make deals. Wharton also uses a second-price auction in which the highest bidder wins, but he or she pays the amount of the second-highest bid. Economists like the second-price auction because they think it encourages more honest bidding. …

And, arguably, the fairest. “It’s capitalism gone nuts, but it’s also absolute socialism because everyone is born with the same number of points,” says Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy.

I used to teach a subject on game theory where the class project was to reviewing bidding systems like Wharton’s and design one for MBS. Actually, Wharton is nothing compared to the Chicago GSB which has students bid for schedules. Anyhow, the MBS students usually decided that having a bidding system wasn’t worth the bother because only a few subjects were the really popular ones; although that perhaps is partly to avoid having the conflicts that a bidding system would resolve.

But the innovative projects did suggest various mechanisms for using bids to translate into dollars to alleviate the supply constraint on scarce but popular classes. To me, the greatest value in having a bidding system was that it would force students to really learn about economics, finance, etc., so that they could perform better in getting the classes they want.

Richard Hayes and I have just completed a 2007 update of the Innovation Index (with data now through to 2006). The following shows Australia’s relative performance and performance over time.

Macroeconomic performance is responsible for maintaining our relative position but neglect in terms of public expenditure on secondary and tertiary education and the share of R&D performed in Universities over the past decade is not helping. Indeed, we could be in the top 10 in the world if we adjusted those to the top quartile of OCED best practice.

Lots of fodder there for our innovation policy review panel.

It looks like CRA’s Henry Ergas has joined the blogosphere and is a welcome voice. Yesterday he posted on the ACCC’s new merger guidelines. He wrote:

… the Guidelines devote a great deal of space to discussing vertical and conglomerate mergers and the ways in which they could, at least in theory, harm competition: indeed, the discussion of the potential unilateral effects of these mergers dwarfs that of horizontal mergers. This is striking, as it is usually sensible to presume that mergers that are purely vertical or purely conglomerate will not materially harm competition. Indeed, a recent survey of the empirical literature on vertical mergers (by Francine Lafontaine & Margaret Slade, “Vertical Integration and Firm Boundaries: The Evidence” in the Journal of Economic Literature, 2007) finds that the “weight of evidence is overwhelming” that vertical mergers tend to benefit consumers, even in industries where concentration levels are high.

Henry is concerned that the ACCC is overly interested in vertical mergers that often have beneficial impacts on consumers.

But isn’t that precisely where we want guidelines to be more specific? Vertical mergers are the hard stuff of competition law precisely because there are many instances where they benefit consumers. In that respect, we want the guidelines to carefully delineate alternative possibilities and provide guidance as to how the ACCC will approach them. Moreover, when it comes down to it, studies that show that such mergers benefit consumers are biased in an important direction: those mergers are either not opposed or are selected on the basis of the potential weight of competition law. That means that mergers that happen are those that benefit consumers while those that do not never make it to actuality. The result is that amongst mergers that have taken place, we will see them benefiting competition. That is just an indication that the system is working.

Of course, some get through. The ACCC opposed AGL’s partial acquisition of Loy Yang A a few years ago but the Court let that merger through. Interestingly, the new guidelines tell us that the ACCC will look at both the ability of a firm acquiring a vertical asset to harm competition as well as its incentive to do so. This is a useful distinction that reflects the latest thinking in vertical merger analysis. But consider how this would apply in the AGL case. There was agreement between the experts in that case that there might be an incentive to raise prices but the ability of the conglomerate to do so was brought into question.

That merger happened despite the ACCC’s assessment that it would be bad for consumers. Frank Wolak and I looked back at it last year to see whether the ACCC’s concerns were borne out and concluded that they were. So this is a situation where the ACCC was right to be concerned; although we both acted for the ACCC in that case. (Henry Ergas represented AGL).

Following up from my Age piece yesterday, Nick Gruen — who was also there — notes that I wasn’t asked to consider the proposed income tax cuts at all. So let me offer my view here: the big issue is whether these are fueling inflation. But even if they are, delaying them a year or so will do little to stem that. Household expenditure relates to permanent income increases and a delay would not change that much (unless of course, people decide that the tax cuts are never coming). The same is true of Nick’s proposal to put it all into super: little change in permanent income there.

My proposals — a hike in the GST (I was thinking to say 15%) and the introduction of green taxes — would be new and unexpected. They also hit consumption more directly and so, if that is the cause of inflation, then they are likely to be more effective. I must admit that I don’t think hiking the GST is politically viable at the moment unless, of course, the inflation concerns are really bad. Green taxes are another matter. I like to put those ideas out there. I did that a few weeks back on bank switching costs and look what happened then.

And on the issue of whether inflation is real, I’m no seer on macroeconomics but the micro part of me doesn’t think the government has any incentive to blow that out of proportion. They have a good run up until the next election and the only problem that might arise is if the economy goes off the rails. They have every incentive to keep it running there; in contrast, to the previous doomed Coalition government.

I must admit, before today, I did not know what to expect from the long overdue apology to the stolen generations. I thought that with all of the waiting, it might have been just going through the motions. But watching the session this morning, I was pleased with the tone, the recollections, the concern and the reserved nature of the proceedings. It was something that school children could watch and see our government working well. The PM’s speech did not overclaim its importance and Nelson, who faced an unenviable job given the Coalition’s weakness in the past, did an excellent job; as did all those of the previous government who stood behind him as he delivered his speech. This was all made possible by the Government choosing not to monopolise the day and to establish a first bipartisan approach to indigenous issues. I am sure there is plenty for the cynical to jibe at even on this day but, for my part, this was pleasing to see and I am grateful that we took a moment to touch history.

I have a short piece in The Age today [over the fold] on inflation and tax cuts.

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