ECONJEFF

Ed does transport

2012-02-14T19:36:00.004-05:00

I try to avoid linking to things that are also linked to on Marginal Revolution, but this piece by my graduate school colleague Ed Glaeser on transport policy is too excellent not to link to.

I particularly liked this:

Infrastructure investment only makes sense when there is a clear problem that needs solving and when benefits exceed costs. U.S. transportation does have problems -- traffic delays in airports and on city streets, decaying older structures, excessive dependence on imported oil -- but none of these challenges requires the heroics of a 21st century Erie Canal. Instead, they need smart, incremental changes that will demonstrate more wisdom than brute strength.

And this:

There is an old joke that 40 years of transportation economics at Harvard can be boiled down to four words: “Bus Good, Train Bad.'

Most of this, of course, is Economics 101 (non-zero price good, zero price bad) or Public Finance 101 (have transport projects financed by the states or localities that actually benefit them rather than by the central government). But you can go an awfully long way toward improving the state of public policy in any area by just taking seriously undergraduate economics, undergraduate econometrics and cost-benefit analysis.

Valentine fun for math geeks

2012-02-14T17:34:00.000-05:00

Google this function and guess (it's really difficult) what you will get:

sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7) *(4-x*x)^0.01,sqrt(6-x^2),-sqrt(6-x^2) from -4.5 to 4

Hat tip: Lisa Neidert

Assorted links

2012-02-14T07:45:00.001-05:00

1. Canada moves West

2. Religion in China

3. Extreme golf in Texas

4. Frum on Keystone

5. NYT on foreign students at my alma mater, the University of Washington

Hat tip to Dann Millimet on #3.

Applied theory question in re: junior job market

2012-02-14T07:40:00.002-05:00

This question was raised by our junior job candidate yesterday: why do economics departments require junior job candidates to wear suits, when they will not be required to (and, in nearly all cases, will choose not to) once they have a job.

Not requiring a suit for the job talk would seem to provide a possible recruiting advantage for economics departments relative to biz schools as it would make very salient to the candidate the fact that a decent chunk of that higher biz school salary will be spent at clothing stores and, of what is left, at least some is compensating difference for having to play dress up all the time.

I tried to think of a reason why making the candidate wear a suit could be a good idea, and the only thing I could come up with is that it makes them stand out in the department during their visit. If you see a young person standing in the hall looking lost in a suit in January and February, you know it is a junior job candidate! But this seems like a thin reed to support such a strongly set behavior.

Perhaps the cheap talkers have an answer?

Hat tip: Herr Stroebel

Urinal economics

2012-02-14T07:34:00.003-05:00

Cheap Talk provides economics you can use, at least if you are male.

I recall the urinal game - see the comment from Lones Smith - from graduate school. And, you know, I bet it was Lones who was passing it around then too.

Markets in everything: meat water

2012-02-13T17:13:00.000-05:00

Find more flavors on their website.

Hat tip: Jackie Smith

More on the contraception insurance mandate

2012-02-13T09:28:00.000-05:00

John Cochrane took more time and said it much better than I did in my earlier post.

UM history: typewriter edition

2012-02-12T12:50:00.003-05:00

Great old photos of UM students typing up their work on coin-operated typewriters.

Live music: Dorkestra

2012-02-12T10:15:00.003-05:00

We caught the first set of Dorkestra's performance last night at a local venue and quite enjoyed it. They reminded me a bit of Manhattan Transfer, though with broader musical tastes and, well, more dorks.

Recommended for locals interested in a bit of musical fun.

The link is to their myspace page; they are on facebook too.

Alternative job search strategies in economics: Justin and Betsey edition

2012-02-12T09:48:00.000-05:00

Nice of the NYT to produce a puff piece on Justin and Betsey in the midst of their senior job search! I wonder how one goes about setting that up?

I was a bit surprised by this:

BUT it is their work on lovenomics, as it might be called, and their popularity with the news media, that have brought them attention outside the academy. Their modest celebrity has led to some sniping among their peers — several would not publicly declare their criticism — but their fans are effusive.

I do not always agree with Justin on policy stuff, but he never embarrasses the profession by lowering the level of debate to personal attacks in the way that some other economists do. My sense too is that Betsey did a fine job in what is truly a thankless and mind-numbing (and poorly paid) position as chief economist at the Department of Labor. And the debate within the profession about whether the economics of the family is a good idea or a bad one was settled a long time ago in the affirmative. Moreover, popular economists who emphasize the economics over the politics do both society and the profession a big favor by encouraging interest in undergraduate economics courses.

I was surprised by this bit too:

They are now writing an introductory economics textbook.

Seems like a bad productivity signal for the senior job market to me.

And worse yet is this:

Ms. Stevenson has ... a stylish taste in clothes and shoes.

Those familiar with the level of dress in the typical economics department will understand that hiring a colleague with a "stylish taste in clothes and shoes" imposes a huge burden on everyone else, who then looks worse by comparison and, as a result, feels badly about their appearance and/or wastes real resources trying to catch up. Really, the NYT is not helping them here.

If you can get past occasional airhead reader stuff like this bit:

Their home in Philadelphia, in a historic building that once housed an African-American publishing house, features soaring ceilings and custom iron work. A glass-top Noguchi coffee table is in the living room, next to a white Jonathan Adler casting couch covered in a sheepskin throw from Costco. In the attic is a home gym with a treadmill, a boxing bag, a recumbent bicycle and a flat-screen television.

the remainder of the article is well worth reading and includes some information about what graduate courses in economics are like.

Addendum: Tyler Cowen thinks about the NYT profile of Justin and Betsey in terms of the new Charles Murray book as well as his older book the Bell Curve.

Addendum 2: Additional interpretative information for those new to this blog: This post was not really intended as a "zing" but rather as some gentle teasing, a bit of praise, and some cheerful mocking of the NYT and (some of) its readers and their evident interest in the dress and decorating habits of economists, the latter of which strikes me as rather like looking to actors for guidance in politics. Finally, I know both Justin and Betsey, though not well, and my impression is that one or both of them reads this blog at least occasionally. I wrote the post with the understanding that they would read it.

Addendum 3: In just over a day, this post is third on my all time list, after only my post on matching and my post on journal spam.

Via: Greg Mankiw

Aborting the contraception policy follies

2012-02-11T15:51:00.003-05:00

The economist reports an apparent "compromise" on the issue of forcing insurers to cover contraceptives but neglects to actually mention the economics of the issue. To wit:

1. Health insurance and, indeed, many health expenditures in general are, for historical reasons, tax favored in the US. Put differently, the tax system distorts prices in favor of health care and away from other goods. This results in over-consumption of health care and a loss in welfare to society as a whole. A welfare-increasing policy would seek to reduce the number of price distortions, rather than increasing it.

2. More broadly, it makes little sense for "insurance" to cover small, predictable expenditures. No one does this with their car insurance. The reason they do it with health insurance is because of the tax favoring mentioned above, which overcomes the lost output due to the administrative overhead associated with the insurance system. We should be trying to move away from this equilibrium, not swimming further out into the seething ocean of bad policy design.

There is no reason to even wheel in moral concerns here. All you need is economics.

A different angle on the issue from Greg Mankiw.

Requests for letters of recommendation

2012-02-11T13:33:00.000-05:00

This is from the LSE:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Jeffrey Smith,
You have been asked by NAME OF STUDENT (EMAIL OF STUDENT) to complete a letter of reference for the London School of Economics and Political Science in support of FIRST NAME OF STUDENT's application for the following programme(s):

N3UA
LN43

Firstly, thank you on behalf of LSE and NAME OF STUDENT EMAIL OF STUDENT for agreeing to supply a reference. We realise this is a busy time of year and that you will receive many such requests.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Actually, if the LSE admissions office really cared about my time, they would add a line or two of code to the program that generates these emails that would write out the names (i.e. actual English words) of the programs being applied to rather than providing obscure administrative codes, as if I had nothing better to do all day than to poke around the internet trying to find out what N3UA might be.

Grumble.

Fed humor

2012-02-11T13:09:00.001-05:00

Valentine's Day humor with a money and banking flavor from the folks at the Fed.

As an aside, I think there is a bit more competition for being "the closest thing the economics profession has to being a certified hipster" than the Wall Street Journal lets on, perhaps even from among my junior colleagues at Michigan.

Via Justin Wolfers on Facebook

My favorite Economist cover ever

2012-02-11T13:01:00.002-05:00

One of my colleagues at Western Ontario had this on his door for a long time. I've gone looking for it on the internet a couple of times, but finally found it the other day in an article about the best Economist covers.

Prices matter: luggage edition

2012-02-11T10:55:00.002-05:00

Imagine the surprise of the airlines when they started charging for checked bags but not carry-on bags! People started carrying-on more bags. Who could have predicted this? Surely there is some model about to capture this odd behavior.

For me at least, one of the two main values of being a frequent flyer on Delta is getting to board early, which implies not having to worry about overhead bin space (the other is sometimes getting to sit in the front). The frequent flyer miles themselves are a distant third.

Of course, I never checked bags unless I absolutely had to, even without the fees, because it sucks up an extra 20-30 minutes at the end of the flight and runs the risk of damage or loss of the bag.

Math in the UK

2012-02-11T10:45:00.003-05:00

Is math (or maths, as the brits would say) falling out of fashion in the UK? So says a recent report.

There are few better investments one can make in one's youth than learning lots of math. Perhaps the most important benefit that I received in college from majoring in both economics and computer science was that computer science required math through numerical analysis, while economics, at the time, required only one quarter of college calculus. I would never have survived the first year in the Chicago economics program (nor, probably, would I have been given the opportunity to try) without the extra math.

The trick, of course, is making the point about the importance of math as a parent without simply causing rebellion and the opposite of the behavior one intends to promote.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Does being a union boss pay well?

2012-02-11T10:42:00.000-05:00

From portside.org, a meditation on highly paid trade union presidents.

I think I would be more worried about the long terms in office than about the salary levels. Perhaps some term limits might be useful in the labor union context? An interesting comparison would be to the typical tenures of CEOs of similarly sized public companies. I suspect the mean is lower for the CEOs.

My day, yesterday

2012-02-09T08:35:00.000-05:00

7:00 Get up, eat breakfast, check email, be astounded at how many people have read my post on graduate admissions, surf a bit.

7:30 Walk (!) to campus

8:30 Attend the "causal inference in education research seminar" which features a really interesting paper by a graduate student in statistics on bandwidth selection in regression discontinuity designs. Make lots of comments. Think interesting thoughts.

10:00 Walk to my office, check emails, meet with a clever student, be happy that one of my students got a great post-doc offer.

11:30 Attend a junior job talk by an interesting and entertaining job candidate. My colleagues hold the mistaken belief that we gain some sort of strategic advantage by keeping our flyouts a secret, so I cannot say who the candidate was, but the candidate had an Australian accent.

1:00 Have a nice chat about junior hiring and about some graduate students with one of my clever junior colleagues.

1:30 Meet with one of my clever graduate students about our joint paper.

2:00 Meet with one of the students in my undergraduate class about her presentation next week. She is well-prepared and eager to learn more about the methods used in the paper.

2:30 Yesterday was the first day of student presentations of published papers followed by class discussion in my undergraduate seminar on program evaluation. The presenter did a very good job and, unlike in some past years, the discussion took right off among the students so that I hardly had to say anything. This makes me very happy.

4:00 Attend the quantitative methodology seminar at the Institute for Social Research. The presenter is one of my graduate students. She does a good job with her opening my remarks, and then my colleagues, drawn from five or six different departments and schools around campus, provide a non-stop stream of really useful comments on the work. Huge value-added.

6:30 Go to dinner at Zingerman's Roadhouse with the job candidate and two of my clever and entertaining colleagues. The service and the food, as always, are as good as the company.

9:45 Check my email and find out that one of my students (a different one than the one who got the post-doc offer) got another flyout. I am very happy.

The amazing bit: I am paid to have days like this.

Addendum: there are a lot of grumpy people on econjobmarketrumors.

Addendum 2: so the comments on econjobmarketrumors have been on my mind (which is why one should never, ever read comments on econjobmarketrumors). I think the deal is that I write this blog on the assumption that most readers either know me personally, or read regularly, or both. I can see why a reader not in either category might misinterpret both this post and the one on letters of recommendation. Something to keep in mind going forward as I write.

Imbermania

2012-02-09T08:05:00.002-05:00

Congrats to my friend and semi-student (*) Scott Imberman for landing a job at Michigan State, and to my clever friends at Michigan State for hiring him!

(*) I formally left Scott's committee when I left Maryland but still wrote a letter for him when he was first on the job market.

A very entrepreneurial idea from a UM undergraduate

2012-02-07T15:54:00.002-05:00

This is priceless! I rarely walk to work late on a Saturday or Sunday morning, but the evidence from the few times I have suggests a non-trivial demand for this important service.

The video creator's blog is here.

Via: Damn Arbor

Progress in East Lansing

2012-02-07T11:39:00.003-05:00

Put slightly differently: only 12 percent of our fans are drunk!

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Urban ruins: North Brother Island

2012-02-06T21:02:00.001-05:00

The Daily Mail provides pictures and some history about an abandoned public health facility in New York City.

Callista the Transformational Wife

2012-02-05T13:39:00.001-05:00

Maureen Dowd has some catty (and, to be sure, ideologically driven) fun at the expense of Newt's third wife.

While it is certainly possible to go overboard, having a partner who is a bit of a cheerleader is actually pretty nice. I have learned how to do this from my wife, who is very good at it. Mutual cheerleading, up to a certain point, is also, I suspect, one of the keys to a successful relationship.

Via Arthur Robson on Facebook

Summers memo

2012-02-05T09:41:00.001-05:00

David Warsh at Economic Principals has some thoughts about the memo on policy responses to the initial phases of the great recession written by Larry Summers during the lead-up to the Obama administration.

Dirty dancing in Mundelein

2012-02-05T09:35:00.000-05:00

A fine memo from the Smoking Gun.

Those kids today! Good thing we never got in trouble when we were young.

Graduate school admissions

2012-02-05T09:23:00.000-05:00

A fine description of the decision process for graduate admissions from the folks at orgtheory.net. Almost all of it carries over from sociology to economics, with the exception of the fact that in economics you basically must have a GRE math score over 750, if not over 780, or you are done.

I would reinforce two additional bits. First, most letters are completely uninformative. And the reason for that is not that the letter-writers would not like their letters to be informative, but rather because they have very little information about the student requesting the letter that is not obvious from their transcript. I wrote five or six such uninformative letters this year for students from my undergraduate regression class. What I can add to the transcript is (a) information about course content - which is relevant for places looking to hire regression runners, but not so relevant for graduate schools; (b) their relative rather than absolute performance in my class and (c) information about the overall level of grade inflation at Michigan as it relates to their transcript as a whole.

Second, at some point in the winnowing process it comes down to randomization and hunches. When I did graduate admissions at Maryland one year I was handed 120 folders from the "rest of the world" - there, as at Michigan, there is geographic specialization by faculty on this task. I read through them all and managed to narrow down the choice set to about 20 strong applications. At that point, I essentially randomized because that was no more or less arbitrary than any other scheme I might have used given the extreme multi-dimensionality of the choice problem. So, I picked the applicant who said in his personal statement that his friends called him "Golden Eagle" and the one who talked in his personal statement about playing Dungeons and Dragons. I kind of intended to follow up on them to see how they did, but I lost track once I left Maryland.

Addendum: in two days, this is #5 on my all time pageview list.

Good help is hard to find ..

2012-02-05T09:09:00.003-05:00

even at the shiny new Whole Foods in Mississauga, Ontario.

PhD Lexicon

2012-02-04T21:39:00.001-05:00

Via Nat Wilcox on Facebook

Strategic responses to performance management: home edition

2012-02-04T06:29:00.001-05:00

Our daughter is occasionally the subject of performance management - i.e. numerical targets for particular outcomes - especially around healthy foods. The other night she had a performance target to meet regarding the number of cucumbers on her plate that she was to eat. The reward for meeting the performance target was some treat or another.

Performance management is, of course, designed to (partially) solve principal agent problems, where in this case the principal is mom and the agent is our daughter. At some point during dinner, the principal left the room, at which point our daughter (but 4.5 years old) realized that she could alter her measured performance without changing her actual performance by engaging in strategic behavior. In particular, she picked up her cucumbers and carried them over to where I was sitting and put them into my salad, and then returned to her chair in time for mom's return to the room.

Imagine the warm glow in my cold economist heart.

You know, someone ought to write a book about all this.

Salvia Salvation

2012-02-03T08:36:00.003-05:00

I had never even heard of the drug Salvia until reading this reason story - yes, I am way behind - by Jacob Sullum, author of Saying Yes. Salvia is, of course, the new heroin/crack/etc. despite any serious evidence of it having actual ill effects on people who use it.

The story is notable for two things. The first is that Sullum actually takes one for the team and gives a first hand account of trying Salvia, both via tincture and via water pipe. The second is its portrayal of state legislators, quite a number of whom, from many states, Sullum interviewed for the story. One sort of knows intellectually that the sort of people who sort into state legislatures are not very clever, nor particularly concerned with, or even good at dealing with, empirical evidence. But this story just rubs you in the face with their willingness to ban substances about which their only knowledge is a youtube video or some remark by a relative.

The real bad drug here is government. It truly is amazing that we have any freedom left at all.

Movie: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

2012-02-03T08:25:00.000-05:00

We saw Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy a couple of weeks ago at the State Theater.

I really liked it. It is a very old school, highbrow sort of spy movie - the antithesis of, say, Mission Impossible - with impeccable acting, gorgeous sets and scenes that capture the grey soul of 1970s Britain, and an intricate plot that slowly unravels throughout the movie. Don't expect a lot of chase scenes, explosions or automatic weapons. Do expect a stimulating couple of hours. The NYT likes it too.

Recommended.

Dump Ellen?

2012-02-03T08:18:00.001-05:00

Social conservative group "One Million Moms" wants JC Penny to drop Ellen DeGeneres as its spokesperson because well, you know, she fools around with women. And that, is very, very naughty.

I have to fess up that I have always had a bit of a crush (unrequited, obviously) on Ellen. So maybe I am overly defensive. But let me, for the moment, try to put myself in the head of a social conservative (eeek!). Ellen is probably (certainly?) the only major comedian whose routine is not filled with swearing and sex both on (where there are limits) and off (where there are not) of network television. Indeed, part of what makes her such a great comedian is that she can get laughs without dropping the f-bomb or making people squirm with jokes about pedophilia and incest (as in the last George Carlin show I saw). One might, as a social conservative, contrast Ellen with, say, my favorite late-night host Craig Ferguson, who drops the f-bomb constantly even on his network show (bleep, bleep!) and who, for example, might spend an entire monologue on jokes related to the adult video awards. Is what you do in bed, where no one can see, so important to social conservatives relative to what you do in public that it trumps everything else?

Frankly, I think the Million Moms need to get their collective minds out of the gutter (or at least out of Ellen's bed) and find something actually useful to do with their time, energy and money. I commend Martha Stewart's website for this purpose.

Hat tip: Dann Millimet

Super Bowl in London?

2012-02-02T08:57:00.000-05:00

Richard Florida on holding a Super Bowl in London.

At first blush, I thought this seemed like an odd idea given the failure of NFL Europe to create a successful American football league outside of the US.

On the other hand, perhaps the NFL will end up like the England's Premier League in soccer (i.e. football everywhere but the US and Canada) with fans around the world following via satellite TV and the internet. Fox Sports was hyping Premier League games during its NFL playoff broadcasts.

And in Canada, my sense is that the NFL actually has more fans than the local league, the CFL, even though there are not any NFL teams (unlike the other major sports leagues - NBA, NHL and MLB) in Canada. I am not sure I ever met an actual Canadian who would fess up to having watched a regular season CFL game, though many watch the Grey Cup (the Super Bowl of Canadian football) as a sort of patriotic duty.

SOTU

2012-02-01T21:06:00.002-05:00

I gather that the "state of the union" address was last week. As is my habit, I took a pass on sixty minutes of lies, mangled statistics, anecdotes posing as data and patriotic balderdash.

Much more entertaining than this year's SOTU is Matt Welch's uber (how does one get an umlaut on here?) SOTU constructed by taking one sentence from each SOTU starting in 1961 and then cobbling them together. Not only are the speeches empty, they are remarkably stable in their emptiness.

Supplier induced demand

2012-02-01T21:01:00.004-05:00

This picture is from outside Northwestern University Hospital in downtown Chicago. It was taken a few weeks ago when I was in Chicago for the American Economic Association meetings.

Learning about the graduate students

2012-02-01T13:39:00.003-05:00

I have been reminded a couple of times in recent weeks that one side benefit to writing letters of recommendation for students who are trying to get funding from the university or from outside sources so that they do not have to be teaching assistants is that you learn a lot about what they have been up to - e.g. learning other languages - or about their backgrounds - e.g. founding an NGO as an undergraduate - that they otherwise neglect to tell you.

Given that writing letters of recommendation (and filling out the associated forms that require guessing how much everyone else who is filling out the form is inflating their ratings of their students, so that you inflate by just the right amount to keep the overall ranking consistent with underlying student performance) has no other direct faculty payoff, it is good that it plays this indirect informational role.

Defining macroeconomics

2012-02-01T10:13:00.001-05:00

"Macro is micro without micro data."

- A colleague who likely prefers to remain anonymous

Charles Murray quiz

2012-01-31T20:59:00.004-05:00

There is an interesting quiz in Charles Murray's (of Losing Ground fame, for older readers) new book Coming Apart that addresses the subject of the cultural disconnect between upper-middle-class Americas and working class and plain-old-middle-class Americans.

My score: on the quiz is 2, with both points coming from movies. And I think of myself as pretty conversant with popular culture by academic standards. Indeed, I still have fond memories of taking one of my graduate school girlfriends (now a successful academic) to Burger King for the first time in her life. Perhaps Murray needs to expand the quiz so that it does a better job of sorting in the tails of the distribution.

Hat tip: Dimitriy Masterov

Travel advice you can use.

2012-01-31T20:36:00.001-05:00

From the Atlantic's James Fallows via the Economist Gulliver blog.

My opinion of Fallows has just gone up. Maybe he'll drink to that?

A budding development economist ...

2012-01-31T10:27:00.001-05:00

... is suspended from "mid-high school" in Oklahoma for snapping a picture of his sleeping substitute teacher.

Corresponding Esther Duflo development economics paper here (this is an older, ungated version. The paper is listed as forthcoming in the American Economic Review on Esther's CV and is now co-authored with both Rema Henna and Stephen Ryan).

Via: reason.

Charlie Brown: media trendsetter

2012-01-30T18:11:00.001-05:00

From the Guardian: the Daily Mail (!!!) surpasses the New York Times as the number one online news source.

Mail's Online's editor, Martin Clarke, puts it down to ever-improving US traffic, and says: "We just do news that people want to read."

In an interview with the BuzzFeed website, he talks about the paper's middle-class roots and its "Fleet Street heritage" being the source of its "entertaining, engaging way with clear, concise, straightforward copy and lots of good pictures."

Read the whole thing to learn about the Times' unhappy responses.

Via: instapundit

Buckeye humor

2012-01-29T22:03:00.001-05:00

Q. How do you get an Ohio State graduate off your porch?

A. Pay him for the pizza.

It is amazing what you can learn while standing in line and wearing your U of M hat.

CNN experts

2012-01-29T14:56:00.002-05:00

As I type this, CNN's chosen higher education expert is speaking in front of a bookcase full of Reader's Digest condensed books.

Oh dear.

Culinary adventures

2012-01-25T09:26:00.002-05:00

Meatloaf cupcakes ... click through to the picture and the recipe, if you dare.

Hat tip: Lisa Gribowski

Orwell in Spain

2012-01-23T11:30:00.000-05:00

Some background on Placa de George Orwell. You should read the book too, especially if you are planning a visit to wonderful Barcelona.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

This post is dedicated to over-zealous corporate IT staff who ban this blog. Surprisingly, not an empty set.

Bacon, chocolate and Zingerman's

2012-01-22T12:41:00.001-05:00

Some interesting food history from the New Yorker.

Clothing police

2012-01-22T12:27:00.000-05:00

Some dingbat politician in Louisiana wants to ban the wearing of pajamas in public.

Williams told the Shreveport Times he was moved to push for an ordinance after an incident at a local Walmart in which he and others were offended by a customer clad in pajamas.

"I saw a group of young men wearing pajama pants and house shoes," he said, according to the Times. "At the part where there should have been underwear," his private parts were showing through the fabric.

Williams [told] the Times that “pajamas are designed to be worn in the bedroom at night."

“If you can't (wear pajamas) at the boardwalk or courthouse, why are you going to do it in a restaurant or in public? Today it's pajamas," Williams said. "Tomorrow it's underwear. Where does it stop?"

In contrast, I want to ban the politicians from speaking in public.

Hat tip: Dann Millimet

Bonus: the Wall Street Journal on pajamas as a fashion trend.

Economist on taxes

2012-01-22T11:25:00.000-05:00

Some wise words (as usual) on taxes from the Economist.

One can more or less summarize the Economist's position as: why don't you idiots read the public finance literature?

Indeed.

Addendum: But wealth is still a stock and income is still a flow. Incomes taxes affect those with high incomes, some of whom are rich and some of whom are not. The Economist really ought to get this right; the rhetorical use of rich to mean high income by those on the left is designed to mislead.

Beer in history

2012-01-22T11:15:00.003-05:00

This is very funny and works on several levels:

1. There is actually a bunch of more-or-less true stuff about beer.
2. It is a fantastic parody of the History Channel and other similar media.
3. It is fun to learn about professors who study beer - one is a "fermentation scientist".

Long, but entertaining throughout.

Hat tip: Mark

Decisions to make in Fargo.

2012-01-21T11:41:00.001-05:00

Hot times in cold North Dakota.

Fargo? Legendary?

The end result of the entire episode is to make the state tourism board look silly.

Recommendation irritation

2012-01-21T08:50:00.001-05:00

Recommendation letters for graduate school are,. on the whole, a giant waste of time and energy. The vast majority of letters I write are for students about whom I have no information other than what is on their transcript other than their rank in my class, which I dutifully report, along with information about the textbook and teaching style, as well as some boilerplate about how hard the class is and how only keeners select into it.

The waste of time associated with such letters is accentuated when the application form is non-standard, so that rather than simply taking a letter that can be written, converted to PDF, and then uploaded at multiple schools, the school being applied to wants individualized responses to its own particular questions, and then to top it all off, designs the software so that you cannot simply cut and paste your pre-written letter, or bits of it, into the response areas.

The worst offender I have run into this year is Cornell's MBA program. For their troubles, or rather for the troubles they just caused me, they got a little lecture in one of their response areas about negative externalities and wasting people's time.

On the endogeneity of wage = marginal product

2012-01-20T15:28:00.001-05:00

Why I love America ..

2012-01-19T18:59:00.002-05:00

Mealtime prayers for pagan families from the "kitchen witch", whose description reads:

I am a (occasionally doting) wife, a damn proud momma of two adorable and brilliant children, a veteran of the United States Navy, part-time steampunk hausfrau, beach addict, (American) Civil War reenactor and Victorian natural history aficionado, a canoeing fanatic, returned student and semi-erratic blogger.

What a country! I do love heterogeneity and I do love people who follow their own path.

Urban prairies and local public goods

2012-01-19T14:08:00.000-05:00

From Atlantic cities, some amazing photos of areas close to downtown St. Louis that are gradually returning to nature in the decades following slum clearance. Detroit has plenty of similar areas; they are testament to the power of local public goods, or the lack thereof, to affect the incidence and character of economic development.

For local readers, driving across the border between Detroit and Grosse Pointe Park on Jefferson Avenue illustrates this point dramatically. There is literally an instant transformation from a not awful but pretty run down part of Detroit to pretty nice homes and businesses. When I have driven by, there has often been a Grosse Pointe Park police cruiser parked just on the Grosse Pointe Park side of the boundary to drive home the point about the change in the nature of public goods provision.

More on interesting ways to pay for college

2012-01-19T14:00:00.000-05:00

The Jackson (Michigan) News runs a story about undergraduates on the web site seekingarrangement.com (probably not a good idea at work) which acts as a broker between buyers and sellers on the medium-term paid relationship services market, informally known as the sugar babies market. This market lies somewhere between paid escorts who charge by the hour or day and particularly mercenary marriages.

The Jackson News story basically riffs on this press release from Seeking Arrangements, but adds in the obligatory scary remarks from local law enforcement (playing double duty here as moral scolds) and local college administrators who note the legal cover provided to their institutions by their email address use regulations, which presumably most students never read.

As with yesterday's Dare Dorm TV story, note the implicit mutually beneficial exchange between the Jackson News, which gets to excite its readers with stories of wild coeds, and the Seeking Arrangements folks, who get free advertising for the site.

A couple other fun bits: (1) the guy who runs the website has an MBA from MIT. I am not really surprised given the clever marketing strategy; and (2) very conservative Hillsdale College has 11 sugar babies signed up on the site with their hillsdale.edu email addresses. I guess the free market message is working.

Hat tip: Actually, I found this on my own via the daily update email from annarbor.com but Dan Marcin also emailed me to alert me regarding the article, perhaps in the hope that a hat tip would help him to capture the votes of sugar babies as well as sugar mommies and daddies in his bid to unseat ancient local Congressman John Dingell.

Hilton in China and for China

2012-01-19T13:40:00.001-05:00

An interview with a Hilton executive about their plans in China and their plans regarding catering to Chinese travelers in their hotels in other countries.

I liked this bit: "Our strategic perspective is that a brand is a promise consistently delivered".

China is indeed a big market in everything. It is hard to recall that, when I was in high school, the number of people leaving mainland China was approximately zero. In addition to their big increase in income, the mainland Chinese have had a big increase in freedom as well. Let's hope there is more to come.

APPAM elections

2012-01-18T10:20:00.001-05:00

At least for the next year or two, the Association for Public Policy and Management will be run by my friends.

Congrats (I think) to Paul, Jens, Marcy, Sue, and Jane.

Dorm porn

2012-01-18T08:38:00.001-05:00

Detroit's Channel 4 local news ("the Defender") reports on the shocking fact that students sometimes make videos of themselves engaged in sexual activity in their dorm rooms. And, worse yet, they send their videos to the nice folks at daredorm.com (NSFW!) in exchange for lots of money.

Can you imagine? Students having sex in the dorms? Video cameras? The internet? Money? What is the world coming to? Surely the end times are near!

Some thoughts.

1. Someone at the UM public relations office scored a great big coup in getting the UM's message to Dare Dorm broadcast for free on the local news.

2. The nice folks at Channel 4 provided a lot of free advertising to the Dare Dormers.

3. Note the use of students (presumably carefully selected for their negative views) to provide the illusion that Channel 4 is engaged in reporting rather than running an anti-sex editorial. Could they really not find a single student with something positive to say about getting lots of money for doing very little work?

4. So let's see. Suppose that you can get $10K for a video. At typical local wages for undergrads, that means putting in, say, two or three hours of time rather than 1000. Those 1000 hours could be spent, say, studying. They might allow an aspiring student to take harder classes or complete a harder major than he or she otherwise would. Is that necessarily a bad tradeoff?

5. In the age of facebook and surveillance cameras does anyone really think that one video on Dare Dorm is going to ruin someone's life, as suggested by the undergraduates interviewed for the story? How exactly will someone's children find their parents' Dare Dorm video from among the zillions of porn videos on the internet?

6. Note to Channel 4: there are lots of important things to report on in the Detroit metro area. This is not one of them.

Canadian coffee

2012-01-17T16:51:00.000-05:00

Tim Horton's raises the stakes in the cross-border caffination competition.

Via Marit Rahavi on Facebook

Ford School joint doctoral programs

2012-01-17T11:56:00.000-05:00

Happy 10th Anniversary to the Ford School joint doctoral program!

Many of the students whose dissertation committees I have served on during my time at Michigan have been in the joint program. My sense is that they enjoy and benefit from it, and not just because of the nicer offices.

And Mary Corcoran is just a gem.

On Washington football's new defensive staff

2012-01-17T11:48:00.002-05:00

A number of articles:

Former defensive coordinator (during the golden age) and head coach Jim Lambright on the problems with the Husky defense.

Steve Sarkisian on how hard it was to fire Nick Holt.

Jerry Brewer on Justin Wilcox, the new defensive coordinator.

Background on Justin Wilcox from Bob Condotta.

On Keith Hayward, the new defensive backs coach.

Addendum: one last coaching hire, lured away from Cal.

Prostitutes for Paul

2012-01-17T10:57:00.004-05:00

The Daily Mail covers Ron Paul's endorsement by the working girls of Nevada's Bunny Ranch.

One good bit:

Dennis Hof, owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, told CNN: ‘If a client comes into the Bunny Ranch and says ''I'm pimpin' for Paul,'' they’re gonna have a real good time.’

Several of his girls, who were sitting next to him in their underwear, added: ‘Yeah!’

Mr Hof admitted that he had thought about supporting Newt Gingrich ‘because he's a cheater - and we like cheaters', a reference to the fact Gingrich cheated on his second wife.

But you should click through to look at the picture.

Ironic, in a way, that prostitutes would support the only candidate who is not himself a prostitute.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

French credit rating .... sacre bleu!

2012-01-17T10:51:00.001-05:00

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Cochrane on DeLong on freedom

2012-01-16T21:03:00.001-05:00

A memorable, and completely on target, rant from "little Johnny Cochrane" as we called him in the skit show.

Freedom really is the best thing.

SNL on Tebow

2012-01-16T20:22:00.001-05:00

In honor of the Patriots' drubbing of the Broncos this weekend, it seems appropriate to revisit Saturday Night Live's take on the Bronco's saintly quarterback Tim Tebow.

I got into a Facebook debate a couple of weeks ago with some friends of a friend (always a dangerous business) about Tebow's public displays of piety. I defended the position that they are more about self-righteousness than anything else. Said position proved to be unpopular.

Addendum: the Jimmy Fallon piece linked to in the comments is at least as funny as the SNL piece.

Social media and the reformation

2012-01-16T19:51:00.000-05:00

Some interesting historical parallels from the Economist.

Newt on Romney

2012-01-16T15:03:00.001-05:00

I think Newt has lost his mind.

Note to Newt: it is good to speak more than one language.

Perhaps Romney can package his French as "speaking in tongues" to increase his appeal to the evangelical set?

Via Bo Honore on Facebook

Economics of communion wafers

2012-01-16T14:56:00.001-05:00

A quite interesting piece on the history and current workings of the communion wafer industry.

The authors tries to pack more deep meaning into the narrative than it can really sustain. The truck driver carrying the corporate wafers may actually, on any given day, be a lot more spiritual than the nuns whose product competes with the corporate wafers, who may well be pissed off about cloister politics or distracted by their aging feet.

Perhaps there is a follow-on piece lamenting the fact that nearly all bibles are now printed on printing presses by industrial printers rather than being hand-copied by Irish monks? Think of all the jobs!

Via MR (I think)

Dan Drezner and the NYT

2012-01-16T14:52:00.002-05:00

Dan's experience is one example, and far from the worst, that I have heard or read about. Taken together, they make me very suspicious of reporters.

Usually what happens is that I get an email or voice mail from a reporter and then I fret about whether or not to respond until their deadline has passed, then I send an email apologizing for my slow reply. Probably this is not optimal.

I did have a nice, and informative, exchange with an Atlantic reporter a couple of months ago following my apologetic email. Somehow the fact that I am an Atlantic subscriber and reader made me trust him more, though it is not clear why it should.

Fraternity humor

2012-01-16T14:40:00.002-05:00

This is wonderful!

NB: I had to click on the picture to make it larger in order to see the letters.

Applied econometrics bleg

2012-01-15T15:41:00.002-05:00

I am looking for published (including working papers) discussions of the use of propensity score matching and/or inverse propensity weighting in conjunction with sampling weights.

I am aware of the Zanutto (2006) Journal of Data Science paper as well as an informal discussion in my old report, with Juao Pedro Azevedo and Peter Dolton, on the evaluation of the New Deal for Lone Parents prepared for the UK Department for Work and Pensions, but not much else.

Here is a free idea for someone looking to get a zillion cites: update psmatch2 to incorporate weights, then write a paper for Stata Journal about it. Oh, and thank me for the idea.

Illustrating the importance of multiple comparisons corrections ...

2012-01-15T15:30:00.002-05:00

... with a dead fish.

For readers not up on the latest in applied statistics, the multiple comparisons problem arises when a researcher performs a large number of statistical tests, say 100, using some conventional p-value cutoff for "statistical significance." With 100 tests and the traditional cutoff of 0.05, we would expect five statistically significant findings out of 100 tests even in a world in which the null hypothesis of no effect is true in all 100 cases. These five findings would then be reported in the New York Times and all heck would break loose. Multiple comparisons corrections adjust the statistical procedure to reduce the number of false positive findings and thereby to make the New York Times less interesting but more accurate.

Hat tip: Brian Kovak

The amazing success of university administrators

2012-01-15T11:33:00.001-05:00

My esteemed colleague Charlie Brown suggest celebrating the approximate 20th anniversary of this wonderful short rant about university administrators from his former Maryland economics colleague (who had left by the time I got there) Barbara Bergmann.

The only thing missing, perhaps, is anything about the pernicious role of lawyers in the rise of the university administrative caste.

An economist for president?

2012-01-15T09:35:00.002-05:00

Larry Kotlikoff of the Boston University economics department is running for president.

We could do a lot worse. Actually, we will do a lot worse. That's one economist prediction that is sure to come true.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Larry Katz on journals

2012-01-14T13:34:00.001-05:00

Development Impact provides a really useful interview with Larry Katz, long-time editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. For non-economist readers, the QJE is one of the magical "top five" general journals in economics that play a big role (too big, in my view) in determining who does and does not get tenure in good economics departments.

The interview is interesting throughout. Were I ever to be an editor again, something I do not plan on at the moment, I think I would implement Larry's scheme of sending out many requests for referee reports for a given paper, reading each report as it comes in, and then deciding as soon as the verdict is clear. This scheme does two things. First, it reduces average response times, which is nice for the author, however things turn out. Second, it gives referees who care a lot about a particular paper more weight, as they are more likely to get their report in quickly. Certainly the times when I have managed to get a report in before Larry decided based on the views of others were times when I really cared about the paper in one direction or another.

UM in the past

2012-01-14T12:34:00.004-05:00

Annarbor.com gets nostalgic and pulls out some gems from their photo archive showing UM scenes in 1912.

Electoral oddities

2012-01-14T12:25:00.000-05:00

I bet this does not happen very often: Ron Paul came in second not only in the New Hampshire republican primary, but in the democratic primary as well.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

New age fun

2012-01-14T09:15:00.002-05:00

It will surprise no one that this all rings very true in Ann Arbor, that little bit of the west coast that somehow got lost in Michigan.

Hat tip: Susan Major

World Book Encyclopedia

2012-01-13T17:26:00.000-05:00

We arrived early for the information session in the library of Emerson School, where we hope to send our daughter, so I got to spend a few minutes of quality time looking at the 2011 World Book Encyclopedia.

After I got over my shock that dead tree encyclopedias are still produced (albeit with many more color pictures and graphics than the very serious Britannica my parents owned), I decided to check out their coverage of Nobel economists. I had time to look up five: Becker, Friedman, Heckman, Krugman and Samuelson. Of these, only two had entries: Friedman and Samuelson. I would have thought that winning a Nobel prize in anything would be a ticket to an encyclopedia entry, but apparently the World Book committee is more selective than the Nobel committee.

They are not that selective though. In the place where the Heckman entry should have been there was an entry of multiple paragraphs for Margaret Heckler (you should click through just for the hair style), who was a cabinet member (for Health and Human Services) in the Reagan administration. Call me crazy, but is Heckler really more important than Heckman, or Becker or Krugman? Really? Bizarre.

Advances in employment discrimination law

2012-01-13T17:10:00.002-05:00

A northeastern Pennsylvania woman is suing a South Jersey-based maker of frozen treats and other snack foods, claiming that she was wrongfully fired because she wore a prosthetic penis to work.

Pauline Davis, 45, wore the device to the J&J Snack Foods plant in Moosic, Lackawanna County, while she contemplated a gender change, according to a federal civil-rights complaint filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Scranton. She confided in several co-workers about the device, and someone told management, according to the complaint.

She subsequently was fired from her job as a packer/line inspector. Her termination, she claims, was discriminatory because a male co-worker who wore female clothing and prostheses and took hormone treatments was not fired nor disciplined.

The people at J&J snack foods seem to be having a lot more fun than one might normally expect at such a firm. Full story - there is not much more - here.

Via: reason.

WSJ on Romney at Bain

2012-01-13T08:26:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal dug around a bit to find enough data to say something about how well Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney did during his time at Bain.

Some quick thoughts:

1. This article reminded me of the reaction a group of us had to reading the famous early sociology book Suicide by Emile Durkheim. Durkheim knew he wanted to estimate a multiple regression, with suicide rates as the dependent variable, but because of when he was writing he did not know how, so he tried to approximate the multiple regression with a large number of pairwise correlations between suicide and various predictors of suicide. The Wall Street Journal author is in a slightly different position. I think the knowledge is there, but the data are lacking. What you really want to do here is to compare Bain's performance to that of other similar firms, holding constant things like the state of the firms when Bain invests in them and broader economic conditions such as the business cycle. The WSJ, like Durkheim, tries to get at this by sort of conditioning on each right-hand side variable in turn in its discussion.

2. I think the WSJ's decision to measure outcomes a fixed amount of time after Bain's initial investment is defensible as a way of avoiding the endogenous timing associated with measuring outcomes when Bain's investment ends. Though both are interesting and worth looking at.

3. One hates to harsh on the buzz, but firms have a legal and fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize their return on investment. They do not have an obligation, legal, fiduciary or even moral, to maximize the employment of the businesses they operate in the short run. One can debate this situation, but I think that even if one is a strong redistributionist, there is a good case to be made for what is popularly known as the Danish system of "flexicurity" in which firms face low hiring and firing costs and the social insurance and active labor market systems aim to reduce variation in consumption among workers over time (who can, of course, also accumulate precautionary savings to the same end).

4. Gingrich and Perry manage to position themselves as both ignorant and hypocritical. The are hypocritical because they are usually in the business of defending markets and are ignorant because the market-bashing positions they take in going after Romney's time at Bain reflect a deep misunderstanding of how economic growth happens. They should both be assigned some days off from campaigning and given a copy of Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy to read.

Literary humor

2012-01-12T09:40:00.003-05:00

Via Lones Smith on Facebook

RuPaul != Ron Paul

2012-01-12T09:16:00.003-05:00

I doubt anyone is really confusing RuPaul and Ron Paul, but good for RuPaul for using the opportunity to get some free publicity.

And it is fun to imagine a candidate who was a comvex combination of the two: Run Paul!

Movie: the Adventures of Tintin

2012-01-12T09:13:00.000-05:00

Our child care provider for last night cancelled and so "date night" became "family movie night". As a result, we saw Tintin rather than some counterfactual movie aimed at older ages.

But that was not so bad. I was not really familiar with Tintin at any level. I had seen the character around but did not know the history and had never read it. My sense from the NYT review is that having read the books made it a bit harder to like the movie, which is my usual experience in other cases.

For our purposes, it was very good fun and, contra the NYT reviewer, a love interest was not really missed, and would have very much changed the character of the movie. And, yes, the drunkard captain Haddock is portrayed in a more positive light than would be approved of by modern-day public health scolds, but this is art, not a documentary, so people ought to chill out about it. It is also a movie based on books written in a different time, and so ought, in my view, to be true to that time.

My 4.5-year-old daughter was engaged throughout (probably the result of the non-stop pace that the NYT reviewer complains about) which is extra impressive given that the movie runs more than two hours in length.

The one error in the movie, which is set somewhere in the 1930s or 1940s, was having one of the characters use the term "third world". That term came along decades later. I thought big-budget movies like this one had people on staff to check that sort of thing.

Recommended if you have a kid and marginally recommended otherwise.

Two cheers for cheerleading?

2012-01-12T07:31:00.001-05:00

"The Feminist Case for the NCAA's Recognition ofCompetitive Cheer as an Emerging Sport for Women" Free Download BostonCollege Law Review, Vol. 52, p. 439, 2011 Western New England University Schoolof Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 11-1

ERIN BUZUVIS, Western New England University School ofLaw

Email: ebuzuvis@yahoo.com

This Article examines whether a university can countopportunities in competitive cheer to demonstrate compliance with Title IX. Afederal court in Connecticut recently considered this question for the firsttime. Although it held that the sport as it currently exists is notsufficiently similar to other varsity sports to qualify for Title IXcompliance, the decision has mobilized two separate governing bodies to proposemore organized and competitive versions of competitive cheer as possible NCAAemerging sports. This Article argues that these proposals would satisfyregulators and the courts. It then discusses how competitive cheer haspotential to improve Title IX compliance, in a way that would benefit women?ssports generally, by expanding the definition of sport to include those thatare women-driven and by reclaiming as sport an activity - cheer - that wasinitially deployed to separate women from athleticism. In light of thesereasons, as well as the burgeoning interest in competitive cheer at the collegeand high school levels, the Article concludes that the NCAA should promote thegrowth of competitive cheer by endorsing it as an emerging sport for women.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Back in the day or, more precisely, back at Totem Junior High School, yours truly "lettered" in chess. I have to say that I was quite sympathetic to the thoughts that were surely going through the heads of the real jocks on the day of the letter-awarding ceremony, which is that the chess team should not have been involved in any way, shape or form. I am guessing that the NCAA does not (despite the endorsement of Totem Junior High) view women's chess as qualifying under title IX or we would observe many such teams, given how cheap it is to field a chess team.

More broadly though, there are interesting questions here about what does, and what should, define a sport for the purposes of Title IX. One possible criterion would be caloric: my guess is that cheerleading burns substantially more calories than, say, golf, which is, I assume, an "official" sport. Or you could use whether or not there are professionals who make money to define sports, in which case cheerleading would qualify but swimming would not. Or you could ask whether having participated in a particular sport in high school or college has a measurable effect in a wage equation. I bet cheerleading passes that test as well. There is so much for the lawyers to do here, and perhaps some for the economists as well.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

When education fads go wrong

2012-01-10T11:38:00.001-05:00

A math teacher in Georgia does not quite get it right when incorporating the slavery unit into the math problems.

Hat tip: Dann Millimet

Modern christmas

2012-01-09T08:36:00.000-05:00

Belated, but still funny.

Hat tip: someone on Facebook.

Will you still need me ...

2012-01-08T17:12:00.003-05:00

... when I'm 64? A fine meditation on turning 64 from my colleague, and UM dean of libraries, and generally one of the coolest people in the economics department, Paul Courant.

An excellent commercial

2012-01-06T08:22:00.002-05:00

Marginally not safe for work (at particularly prudish workplaces) due to language.

Educational performance management in the UK

2012-01-06T08:16:00.001-05:00

Economists delight in cataloging the many and varied ways in which local government employees, whether in the schools or in job training programs, respond to performance incentives by gaming the system. Under poorly designed performance management systems, it will be easier for workers to improve their measured performance by gaming the system than to improve their actual performance.

The Daily Mail reports on just these sorts of shenanigans in schools in the UK. Schools there are subject to periodic inspections by something called Ofsted. One highlight:

In one example, a teacher described how he was worried about taking three of the worst classes in his ‘hell hole’ school during an inspection.

But, the day before, the deputy headteacher arrived and reeled off the names of more than a dozen of the most challenging pupils from the ‘worst’ three classes.

He told the teacher: ‘None of these little **** will be in tomorrow, you have my word.’

The teacher asked how he could be sure as the pupils had ‘excellent’ attendance records and the senior teacher showed him an ‘inch-thick wad of £20 notes’.

You can find more on this theme (and much else) in my Fiscal Studies paper (with Alistair Muriel) on educational performance management.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Why I am not a republican #9374937

2012-01-06T08:01:00.001-05:00

Dear Lord, please save us from the scourge of Rick Santorum who embodies everything that is bad about the Republican party. Amen.

Movie: The Artist

2012-01-05T07:26:00.001-05:00

We had some trepidation about seeing "The Artist" - it is (sort of) a silent film - but were won over by the very high - 97 - rating at rotten tomatoes. It turned out that the critics were quite right. The film is a delight, visually, historically and due to the beautiful music that (largely) replaces the spoken word.

To quote A.O. Scott's fine NYT review:

All of this suggests a feast for antiquarian film geeks. It certainly is, and Mr. Hazanavicius’s skill in replicating some of the visual effects of early cinema is impressive. But he evokes the glamour and strangeness of silent movies without entirely capturing the full range of their power. His film is less a faithful reproduction than a tasteful updating, like a reconstituted classic roadster with a GPS device and a hybrid engine.

Recommended.

The Fashionable Professor

2012-01-05T07:16:00.004-05:00

It has been a matter of some discussion in my household whether I should teach my undergraduate econometrics course in polo shirts or in button-down shirts. In order to shed some additional empirical light on the issue, I decided to gather some input from the students, and so added a question on the issue to my end-of-semester feedback form. The results from that exercise are:

Button down: 7
Polo: 16
Other: 13
Not voting: 34 (in almost all cases because no feedback form at all was turned in)

The polo total includes three or four votes for "whatever is most comfortable". Among the other suggests were Hawaiian shirts (someone misses Lones Smith), a tuxedo, a tuxedo t-shirt and, from one misguided soul, showing up naked.

Bottom line: next fall I will wear more polo shirts.

Facebook and natural selection

2012-01-05T07:02:00.002-05:00

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

The significance of significance testing

2012-01-05T07:00:00.003-05:00

Gelman, Andrew and Hal Stern. 2006. "The Difference Between `Significant' and `Not Significant' is not Itself Statistically Significant." American Statistician 60(4): 328-331.

It is common to summarize statistical comparisons by declarations of statistical signiﬁcance or insigniﬁcance. Here we discuss one problem with such declarations, namely that changes in statistical signiﬁcance are often not themselves statistically signiﬁcant. By this, we are not merely making the commonplace observation that any particular threshold is arbitrary—for example, only a small change is required to move an estimate from a 5.1% signiﬁcance level to 4.9%, thus moving it into statistical signiﬁcance. Rather, we are pointing out that even large changes in signiﬁcance levels can correspond to small, nonsigniﬁcant changes in the underlying quantities.

The error we describe is conceptually different from other oftcited problems—that statistical signiﬁcance is not the same as practical importance, that dichotomization into signiﬁcant and nonsigniﬁcant results encourages the dismissal of observed differences in favor of the usually less interesting null hypothesis of no difference, and that any particular threshold for declaring signiﬁcance is arbitrary. We are troubled by all of these concerns and do not intend to minimize their importance. Rather, our goal is to bring attention to this additional error of interpretation. We illustrate with a theoretical example and two applied examples.The ubiquity of this statistical error leads us to suggest that students and practitioners be made more aware that the difference between “signiﬁcant” and “not signiﬁcant” is not itself statistically signiﬁcant.

This article is a few years old but I just ran across it. It is a quick read, and yet one more illustration of the many conundrums that arise when one takes classical statistics too literally. I am still working on a way that I am really happy with to teach undergraduates to have a sophisticated understanding of classical significance tests.

Atheist humor

2012-01-04T17:37:00.003-05:00

New defensive staff at Washington

2012-01-04T09:00:00.003-05:00

Washington has already moved to replace Nick Holt and some of the assistants who are departing with him. The speed of the move suggests to me that the decision to let Nick go was made long before the Alamo Bowl.

Sugar Bowl: Michigan 23, Virginia Tech 20 (OT)

2012-01-04T08:59:00.002-05:00

Michigan was just good enough, and Virginia Tech made just enough mistakes, for Michigan to pull out a win in overtime in a game that Virginia Tech dominated much of the time. Well done!

A fitting end to a surprisingly positive season.

John Cochrane blogging

2012-01-03T10:45:00.001-05:00

University of Chicago Booth School macroeconomist John Cochrane is now blogging, which is very cool.

I took John's first-year macro course in the economics department (where he was before moving to Booth) my first quarter of graduate school back in the Fall of 1985. It was an excellent class; John did a really good job of putting each paper that we covered in context and also arranging them in a way so that the entire class told a coherent story.

I also learned from poking around on John's site, that his wife, Beth Fama (the "Fama's daughter" as we called her in one of our better skits) is now writing young adult fiction. Beth was a fellow student in John's class in the Fall of 1985, though as I recall she was getting her doctorate in what was then the Graduate School of Business rather than in economics.

Book: Life in Year One by Scott Korb

2012-01-03T10:14:00.006-05:00

Korb, Scott. 2010. Life In Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine. NY: Riverhead Books.

Another book snatched from Borders with a going-out-of-business discount, Life in Year One by Scott Korb provides a short summary of what is known in the scholarly literature about daily life around the time we started counting years up rather than down. The style is sort of wannabe Bill Bryson, but Korb tries too hard with the jokes and is much less thorough with the literature relative to Bryson.

Bottom line: While the book is by no means awful, I am sure there are better books on this topic, and I wish I had read one of them instead.