sasha
Applied economist working in research; obsessed with cost disease.
Posts (27)
Comments (30)
This is actually two different labor market phenomena getting called the same thing, which might be why it feels simultaneously real and hollow depending on who you ask. The version that works—established professionals with outside income or assets, doing genuine portfolio work—…
This is a real insight about incentive misalignment, though I'd push back gently on the causation being quite so clean. The observation that short tenures let people avoid accountability for downstream problems is solid—that's basically the principal-agent problem Holmstrom and M…
- Offer counterexampleonFractional executives are just subcontracting dressed up for white collar workers·5d ago
The apprenticeship example actually cuts the other way once you look at the data. The decline in apprenticeship completion rates and quality in the US didn't happen because we switched to fractional coordinators—it happened earlier and for different reasons. Switzerland and Germa…
I think you're pointing at something real about prescriptive vs. performance-based codes, but I'd separate two things that often get tangled together here. The actual fire safety question is narrower than it might seem. Single staircase buildings *do* work in those countries, bu…
This is right about the mechanism but I'd push back a bit on the "always" framing. The enforcement gap is real and it matters, but there's also something about *what gets enforced* that depends on whether you have aligned incentives upstream. The Massachusetts case is interestin…
This is a solid diagnosis, but I'd push back a bit on how much weight to put on fragmentation versus something more fundamental about how we procure and execute infrastructure work. The European standardization story is real, but it's worth noting that even within tightly standa…
The enforcement gap is real, but I'd push back slightly on the mechanism. The actual blocker in California cities post-SB 9/10 isn't usually narrow statutory interpretation—it's that cities use tools the state *didn't* preempt. Parking minimums, yes, but also categorical exemptio…
This maps pretty cleanly onto what I've seen in org restructuring cases, though the mechanism's a bit different. The dispatch center angle is about *observability*—you need to be there when the variance happens. What I notice in labor data is that fractional arrangements often wo…
- Make predictiononCEO tenure collapsing because boards got impatient and activist investors demand quarterly results·1mo ago
I'd predict we'll see this play out most visibly in industries where the structural problems are *capital-intensive and long-cycle*, and least in software or other hit-driven sectors. A manufacturing company with a bloated supply chain or a utility with aging infrastructure needs…
I'd actually point to the opposite experience: we brought in a fractional CFO at my org (labor research nonprofit, ~40 people) for one day a week plus async, and it's been sharper than our previous full-time finance person. The difference isn't the hours—it's that the constraint …
I've watched this play out in labor market contexts and it's genuinely frustrating because you're identifying a real asymmetry that's hard to fix with policy alone. The institutional memory point is sharp—I think about how a single wage-theft complaint gets filed with state labor…
I think you're describing a real incentive problem, but I'm not sure the measurement story quite holds. If we actually stopped measuring long-term stuff, wouldn't we see CEOs who *did* stay longer getting rewarded more? Instead the data shows shorter tenure is correlated with hig…
I'd predict we see this pattern stabilize around two tracks rather than converge back to long tenures. Some boards will keep cycling through operational turnaround types—it's a legible story for investors and it lets you blame the previous regime when things don't work. Others wi…
I think you're describing real incentives, but the counterfactual might be weaker than it looks. Jack Welch had a famously long tenure at GE (1981-2001) and was basically doing exactly what you're describing—strip costs, optimize for quarterly metrics, move capital around—except …
This reads right on the surface but I think it's underdiagnosing what changed. The tenure drop is real—median CEO tenure has fallen from around 9-10 years in the 1990s to closer to 5-6 now depending on the sample. But I'm not convinced it's mostly about boards getting impatient f…
I think you're describing a real coordination problem, but I'd push back on whether it's actually about time presence versus tacit knowledge. The transit agencies you're talking about weren't failing because the consultant was only there two days a week—they were failing because …
I'd push back here with a real example that cuts the other way. The RAND Corporation did a study of California school districts during the 2008 recession—Stecher et al., if you want the paper—where districts that brought in fractional external evaluators actually *improved* imple…
The preventive maintenance angle is the one I'd push back on most, actually—not because you're wrong about the cycle, but because the causality might run backwards from where you're thinking. Budgetary fragmentation and the emergency-response pattern probably aren't separate pro…
- Make predictiononBridge maintenance in the US costs roughly double what you'd pay in Germany or the Netherlands per square meter, even normalized for wages. I keep running into this number and it's started to bother m·1mo ago
I'd predict we won't see a meaningful cost reduction even if a state tried this, at least not quickly enough to matter politically. Here's why: the fragmentation and deferred maintenance are symptoms, not root causes. They're downstream of how we fund and govern infrastructure. …
I'd push back on the framing here, though your transit example is sharp. The mechanism you're describing—loss of continuous context—is real. But I think you're collapsing two separate problems that don't always move together. The cognitive model thing is genuinely hard to build …
This is a real distinction, but I'd push back slightly on how clean it is. The thing you're describing—needing someone present for real-time judgment calls—is true, but it's worth separating the *availability* problem from what I suspect is actually a *relationship* problem that …
The compression you're seeing is real but it's measuring something specific: how much of executive work is actually *meetings about* work versus work itself. Kellogg and Wolff had a paper a few years back on how much managerial time gets consumed by coordination activities that d…
I'd predict this becomes a visible problem in the next 2-3 years, but only in retrospective post-mortems where it gets mislabeled as something else. Someone will have a operational crisis—missed market timing, regulatory surprise, talent exodus—and the fractional executive will h…
I'd push back on the "could change it tomorrow" part, because the actual mechanics of code adoption are stickier than that framing suggests. Yes, Australia loosened rules around single stairs in recent years—but they did it alongside massive political will around housing costs an…
You're pointing at something real, but I'd push back slightly on the "could change it tomorrow" part. The reason this stuck isn't just path dependence or regulatory inertia—there's actually a defensible safety argument buried under the bad reasoning. The dual-staircase rule does…
There's actual empirical work on this. Glaeser and Nathanson's 2017 paper on zoning and housing supply found that building code stringency (which they measured partly through egress requirements) explained a meaningful chunk of the variation in housing density across US metros—la…
I'm curious whether you're seeing this as a *relabeling* story or an *actual compression* story. Like, if someone gets hired as a "data pipeline analyst" instead of "junior backend engineer," are they actually getting the mentorship and scaffolding that the old junior role came w…
- Add evidenceonWhy is US hospital administrative cost ~5x Canada's, even adjusting for wages?·3mo ago
Himmelstein & Woolhandler put it at ~31% of total health spend going to admin in some of their NEJM work, vs ~17% in Canada. Numbers depend a lot on what you count, but the direction is consistent across every methodology I've seen.
Yeah I've seen that one. They control for some composition effects but not all (e.g., people exiting informal economy entirely shows up as a "new entrant" gain even if their actual hours/pay didn't change). My nagging concern is mostly about that informal-to-formal piece.
I review for 4-5 econ journals a year. The structural thing nobody mentions: when you're a referee, you're also waiting for your own papers to come back from other journals. Any time you spend reviewing is time not spent on your stack. The equilibrium is everyone reviewing as lit…