Day: April 5, 2021

What is common between the AER and markets in Nashik?

Not a joke, that is a genuine question.

The AER, by the way, is the American Economic Review. Getting published in the AER for an economist is like a cricketer getting to a century in a Test at Lords. Although drawing this analogy does remind me of what Harsha Bhogle said about Sachin and the Lord’s honours board.((Sachin famously never managed to score a century at Lord’s, and therefore his name isn’t up on the Lord’s honours board. Harsha Bhogle apparently asked whose loss it was, Sachin’s, or Lord’s)). Nashik, of course, is a city in Maharashtra.

So what’s the reason for the title of today’s blog post?

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Amid rising Covid-19 cases in Maharashtra, the Nashik district administration has now issued new restrictions to limit people from visiting the markets unnecessarily. The people in Nashik will now have to pay ₹5 per person for an hour every time they visit any market in the city. news agency ANI reports.

https://www.livemint.com/news/india/new-covid-19-restrictions-in-nashik-now-pay-rs-5-for-hour-long-market-visit-11617154785051.html

In the boring but functional language of the economist, no free entry in these markets anymore.((To be clear, the AER thing was an April Fool’s joke.)).

What should we anticipate in terms of effects of such policies? Why? Are these policies good, or bad?

  1. Frivolous visits to both markets become rarer than before. In both cases, that was the intended outcome.
  2. In Nashik’s case, the price isn’t just 5 rupees, but also the time that you will have to spend waiting in line before you can cough up the fie rupees. Plus, the fine print says that if you end up spending more than one hour, you will have to pay 500 rupees as an additional fine.
  3. 1000 dollars is steep even by American standards. It is just completely out of reach for most of the rest of the planet. 5 rupees is nowhere close to being a back-breaking amount for most Indians. Does that make the AER price too high and the Nashik price too low? I think so, but that then begs the question of what the price should be in each case.
  4. You’ll “bunch together” a number of separate visits to the market. You won’t just pop down to the market to buy half a litre of milk in the morning and then pop back later in the day for some onions. You’ll combine the two trips. That is the intended outcome, so this is a good thing! But in the case of the AER entry fee, you’ll want to “get your money’s worth” – which means there is a chance that your paper will end up being longer than would otherwise have been the case. This is nobody’s idea of a good idea!
  5. Neighbours might get together and deputize one person to go get the shopping done. Again, that’s wonderful! Authors will get together too, that is, co-authorship will go up. Free <cough> rider <cough> problems?
  6. At the margin, sellers in Nashik’s markets are incentivized to figure out home delivery options. Again, wonderful! Since getting published in the AER is anything but a perfectly competitive market (just the one seller, by definition), AER has no such incentive. But the substitution effect will come into play, no? Other journals will see more papers being submitted. And if those journals raise prices, then fewer papers will be submitted all around. Personally, I don’t see this as such a big problem.((To be clear, research may not go down. The attempt to publish that research will. And I’m ok with that!))

(Here’s Tyler Cowen on other, related points about the AER pricing.)

As a student of economics, you should be able to see the similarity between both of these pricing calls, and also see the differences. That allows you to begin to think through whether these will, in fact, be good ideas or not, and why. I’m sure that there are many other points to think about in both cases.

If you are a student of microeconomics (and who isn’t, really), it might be worth your while to think about what I am missing in my analysis. Please, feel free to let me know!