Anna Dreber writes: Replication Markets (RM) invites you to help us predict outcomes of 3,000 social and behavioral science experiments over the next year. We actively seek scholars with different voices and perspectives to create a wise and diverse crowd, and hope you will join us. We invite you – your students, and any other […]
Archive of posts filed under the Economics category.
A weird new form of email scam
OK, we all know that spam we get—sometimes spoofed as if from our own email address!—telling us to click on some link. Scene 1 The other day I got a new sort of spam. It was from a colleague, the subject line was “Are you available in campus,” and the email went like this: On […]
Concerned about demand effects in psychology experiments? Incorporate them into the design.
Johannes Haushofer sends along this article with Jonathan de Quidt and Christopher Roth, “Measuring and Bounding Experimenter Demand,” which begins: We propose a technique for assessing robustness to demand effects of findings from experiments and surveys. The core idea is that by deliberately inducing demand in a structured way we can bound its influence. We […]
Swimming upstream? Monitoring escaped statistical inferences in wild populations.
Anders Lamberg writes: In my mails to you [a few years ago], I told you about the Norwegian practice of monitoring proportion of escaped farmed salmon in wild populations. This practice results in a yearly updated list of the situation in each Norwegian salmon river (we have a total of 450 salmon rivers, but not […]
Gendered languages and women’s workforce participation rates
Rajesh Venkatachalapathy writes: I recently came across a world bank document claiming that gendered languages reduce women’s labor force participation rates. It is summarized in the following press release: Gendered Languages May Play a Role in Limiting Women’s Opportunities, New Research Finds. This sounds a lot like the piranha problem, if there is any effect […]
Pre-results review: Some results
Aleks Bogdanoski writes: I’m writing from the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) at UC Berkeley with news about pre-results review, a novel form of peer review where journals review (and accept) research papers based on their methods and theory — before any results are known. Pre-results review is motivated by growing […]
“Did Austerity Cause Brexit?”
Carsten Allefeld writes: Do you have an opinion on the soundness of this study by Thiemo Fetzer, Did Austerity Cause Brexit?. The author claims to show that support for Brexit in the referendum is correlated with the individual-level impact of austerity measures, and therefore possibly caused by them. Here’s the abstract of Fetzer’s paper: Did […]
What if that regression-discontinuity paper had only reported local linear model results, and with no graph?
We had an interesting discussion the other day regarding a regression discontinuity disaster. In my post I shone a light on this fitted model: Most of the commenters seemed to understand the concern with these graphs, that the upward slopes in the curves directly contribute to the estimated negative value at the discontinuity leading to […]
Another Regression Discontinuity Disaster and what can we learn from it
As the above image from Diana Senechal illustrates, a lot can happen near a discontinuity boundary. Here’s a more disturbing picture, which comes from a recent research article, “The Bright Side of Unionization: The Case of Stock Price Crash Risk,” by Jeong-Bon Kim, Eliza Xia Zhang, and Kai Zhong: which I learned about from the […]
Tony nominations mean nothing
Someone writes: I searched up *Tony nominations mean nothing* and I found nothing. So I had to write this. There are currently 41 theaters that the Tony awards accept when nominating their choices. If we are being as generous as possible, we could say that every one of those theaters will be hosting a performance […]
Vigorous data-handling tied to publication in top journals among public heath researchers
Gur Huberman points us to this news article by Nicholas Bakalar, “Vigorous Exercise Tied to Macular Degeneration in Men,” which begins: A new study suggests that vigorous physical activity may increase the risk for vision loss, a finding that has surprised and puzzled researchers. Using questionnaires, Korean researchers evaluated physical activity among 211,960 men and […]
Did blind orchestra auditions really benefit women?
You’re blind! And you can’t see You need to wear some glasses Like D.M.C. Someone pointed me to this post, “Orchestrating false beliefs about gender discrimination,” by Jonatan Pallesen criticizing a famous paper from 2000, “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of ‘Blind’ Auditions on Female Musicians,” by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse. We’ve all heard the […]
Gremlin time: “distant future, faraway lands, and remote probabilities”
Chris Wilson writes: It appears that Richard Tol is still publishing these data, only now fitting a piecewise linear function to the same data-points. https://academic.oup.com/reep/article/12/1/4/4804315#110883819 Also still looks like counting 0 as positive, “Moreover, the 11 estimates for warming of 2.5°C indicate that researchers disagree on the sign of the net impact: 3 estimates are […]
Do regression structures affect research capital? The case of pronoun drop. (also an opportunity to quote Bertrand Russell: This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.)
A linguist pointed me with incredulity to this article by Horst Feldmann, “Do Linguistic Structures Affect Human Capital? The Case of Pronoun Drop,” which begins: This paper empirically studies the human capital effects of grammatical rules that permit speakers to drop a personal pronoun when used as a subject of a sentence. By de‐emphasizing the […]
Conditioning on post-treatment variables when you expect self-selection
Sadish Dhakal writes: I am struggling with the problem of conditioning on post-treatment variables. I was hoping you could provide some guidance. Note that I have repeated cross sections, NOT panel data. Here is the problem simplified: There are two programs. A policy introduced some changes in one of the programs, which I call the […]
“Incentives to Learn”: How to interpret this estimate of a varying treatment effect?
Germán Jeremias Reyes writes: I am currently taking a course on Applied Econometrics and would like to ask you about how you would interpret a particular piece of evidence. Some background: In 2009, Michael Kremer et al. published an article called “Incentives to learn.” This is from the abstract (emphasis is mine): We study a […]
Parliamentary Constituency Factsheet for Indicators of Nutrition, Health and Development in India
S. V. Subramanian writes: In India, data on key developmental indicators that formulate policies and interventions are routinely available for the administrative units of districts but not for the political units of Parliamentary Constituencies (PC). Members of Parliament (MPs) in the Lok Sabha, each representing 543 PCs as per the 2014 India map, are the […]
State-space models in Stan
Michael Ziedalski writes: For the past few months I have been delving into Bayesian statistics and have (without hyperbole) finally found statistics intuitive and exciting. Recently I have gone into Bayesian time series methods; however, I have found no libraries to use that can implement those models. Happily, I found Stan because it seemed among […]
All statistical conclusions require assumptions.
Mark Palko points us to this 2009 article by Itzhak Gilboa, Andrew Postlewaite, and David Schmeidler, which begins: This note argues that, under some circumstances, it is more rational not to behave in accordance with a Bayesian prior than to do so. The starting point is that in the absence of information, choosing a prior […]
“Heckman curve” update: The data don’t seem to support the claim that human capital investments are most effective when targeted at younger ages.
David Rea and Tony Burton write: The Heckman Curve describes the rate of return to public investments in human capital for the disadvantaged as rapidly diminishing with age. Investments early in the life course are characterised as providing significantly higher rates of return compared to investments targeted at young people and adults. This paper uses […]