Student-Advisor Matching and Early Career Publishing Success for Economics PhDs

Michael J. Hilmer; Christiana E. Hilmer
San Diego State University - Department of Economics

Economic Inquiry, Vol. 47, Issue 2, pp. 290-303, April 2009

Abstract:

We examine a unique data set containing information on a PhD recipient’s dissertation advisor, graduate program, and early career publishing success. Regressions controlling for the ranking of both the student’s graduate program and dissertation advisor confirm that, all else equal, students working with prominent advisors are significantly more likely to publish in their early careers, especially in top 36 journals, than students working with less prominent advisors. Moreover, predicted publication values suggest that students attending lower ranked programs but working with superstar faculty publish both more total and top 36 articles and more quality-adjusted pages than students attending top-ranked programs but working with less prominent advisors.

The 'Incidence' and 'Wage Effects' of Mismatch among Immigrant and Ethnic Minority Graduates

A new ESRI working paper by Delma Byrne and Seamus McGuinness looks at mismatch in the graduate labour market among immigrants and second-generation ethnic minority groups. As in other studies of a similar nature (some of which have been discussed on this blog before: Bender and Heywood; 2006 (and Robst; 2007); Nordin/Persson/Rooth; 2008; Budria and Moro-Egido; 2004), the focus is to estimate the incidence and wage effects of over-education and overskilling.

In the Byrne and McGuinness paper, the graduates come from UK universities. The results show that immigrant and second-generation ethnic minority graduates are no more likely to experience education or skill mismatch relative to their native counterparts. Furthermore, graduates from immigrant and ethnic minority backgrounds incur overeducation and overskilling wage penalties that lie well below the level incurred by native graduates.

2010 Spring Meeting of Young Economists

Thanks to Karina for mentioning this. There are at least two Mary Dalys in case there's confusion!

Call for papers

The 2010 Spring Meeting of Young Economists conference is open to any
researcher active in the entire spectrum of Economics. It covers the
wide range of economic endeavor from Trade Theory to Political
Economy, from Game Theory to Finance, from Growth Theory to Business
Cycles, and from Development Economics to Econometric Theory. It
provides a means for young economists to exchange ideas which are
directly and indirectly related to their research and to the work of
their fellow economists.

http://www.smye2010.eu

In 2010, SMYE marks the 15th annual conference, which will be held on
April 15-17, in the picturesque and multicultural City of Luxembourg.
It is jointly organized by CEPS/INSTEAD Research Institute and the
University of Luxembourg.
We invite submissions from all areas of economics. The deadline for
submission of abstracts is November 15th, 2009. If you are interested
in presenting, please make your abstract submission by going to the
main conference website and click on the registration tab. A limited
number of scholarships will be granted to conference participants
submitting a full paper by February 1st. Participants coming from
underrepresented countries that have trouble obtaining funding are
particularly encouraged to apply for scholarships.

Deadlines
Nov 15th 2009 Abstract submission
Jan 15th 2010 Notification of abstract acceptance
Feb 1st 2010 Full paper submission to be considered for scholarships
Mar 1st 2010 Full paper submission
Mar 1st 2010 Registration at reduced fee (40 EUR)
April 1st 2010 Final registration (50 EUR)

Speakers (To be confirmed)
Mary C. Daly (Vice-president, San Francisco Federal Reserve Board)
http://www.frbsf.org/economics/economists/staff.php?mdaly

Tito Boeri (Professor, Bocconi University and CEPR)
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/49
http://didattica.unibocconi.eu/docenti/cv.php?rif=48791&cognome=&nome=

For more information on the conference, please contact
smye2010@ceps.lu

What’s Smart About Ireland’s Smart Economy?

This is the title of an RIA event to be held at City Hall, Dame Street, Dublin 2 on Wednesday, 14 October 2009, at 6pm. More details are available on the RIA website here (scroll down to #4). The event is sponsored by the Higher Education Authority and is part of Innovation Dublin Week 2009. It is jointly organised with Dublin City Council.

Chair: Professor Michael Cronin MRIA

Panellists: Professor Peter Clinch, Taoiseach’s special adviser on the smart economy, David O’Meara, Managing Director of Havok, Jim Barry, CEO, National Toll Roads, Professor Frances Ruane, MRIA, Director of the Economic and Social Research Institute and Tom Boland, CEO of the Higher Education Authority

Geary Historical Walk

We recently went on a historical walk by well-known tour guide Pat Liddy. Here is a photo taken on Henrietta Street.

Structured Interactions and Research Productivity

Anybody who has worked on large scale projects that involve, for example, large scale survey design, data collection, development of policy reports on top of the development of academic papers and intellectual development will know that there are a lot of challenges involved. One key issue is how communication is structured in the group. Some of this is "soft" in terms of good personal relations, day-to-day interactions but the use of technology is almost essential once one goes through a certain scale.

Some of the technologies I have found useful and some remaining issues are below:

(i) blogger is a simply great way of keeping general information flowing around and fostering an ideas culture as well as making connections to people outside a group who might be interested. I have not found it useful though for actual management of projects or internal project management though I would be surprised if it couldn't be adapted for this purpose.

(ii) Microsoft Project is good for initial planning and particularly for forcing one to define exactly what you are going to do. over time, you realise that this doesnt mean that the creative and academic part goes out the window. it just means you are forced to think hard about what you are proposing to do.

(iii) Basecamp is still the most useful software I have come across for managing projects with defined timelines and diverse groups. The reason basecamp is so useful is that anyone with computer literacy of even a basic level can figure out precisely how it works within ten minutes. I have been using this for over a year now and have all the projects I am responsible for programmed on it. Nerds will not like basecamp. The functionality is very basic but behavioural economists will really appreciate it as it "nudges" one very effectively into getting the working structure of a project operating smoothly.

(iv) Google is developing something called Google Wave that is worth looking at for structuring defined message streams. This may make it more easy to collaborate on defined sub-projects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ&feature=channel


(v) Managing of email is something I have never fully gotten to grips with (see Andrew Gelman on this). During term, I get approximately 80-100 non-spam work-related emails a day, which is probably more than most of you but less than some senior people I have worked with. I have used things like "to-do" folders and so on but have never fully gotten to grips with this and am actively thinking of ways to do this. One thing I am toying with is the idea of having things like message boards for my courses and research projects and simply send autoreplies in cases where the message board is a better way of processing a query. If there are any nerds or potential product developers out there, feel free to use the comments to suggest your solution. Generally, very senior people in organisations have ways of dealing with this. But I would say that email management is still a huge issue for many of us who are trying to balance research and teaching. Perhaps Google Wave is the answer but for many projects you cant enforce a requirement that all participants have a gmail account. This is an issue also for Google calendar as a project management tool.

(vi) turning things like collaboratively generated project calendars and so on into actual documents that one could put into progress reports and research proposals is another issue I have struggled. Neither basecamp nor microsoft project really allow you to do this without a lot of hassle, which is actually a real shame.

Gettings thing done

David Allen wrote a now well-known time and self management book that I personally found useful though am still a long way from the ideal it puts forward. Below is a video of him giving a talk on his system at Google. One of the toughest things of going through a research career is balancing one's huge enthusiasm to do things with the time constraints operating. Thinking about your own style of doing this and how it influences your well-being is a worthwhile thing to do.

Eric Igou: Geary Seminar

September 29th 2009.

1pm UCD Geary Institute Seminar Room.

Eric Igou (University of Limerick)

"Self versus other: On differences in predicting negative affective states".

Financial Literacy and Retirement Readiness

Those working on ageing as well as literacy may be interested to see how financial literacy affects the retirement decision.

How Ordinary Consumers Make Complex Economic Decisions: Financial Literacy and Retirement Readiness

Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia S. Mitchell

This paper reports on several self-assessed and objective measures of financial literacy newly added to the American Life Panel (ALP), and it links these performance measures to efforts consumers make to plan for retirement. We evaluate the causal relationship between financial literacy and retirement planning by exploiting information about respondents’ financial knowledge acquired in school - before entering the labor market and certainly before starting to plan for retirement. Results show that those with more advanced financial knowledge are those more likely to be retirement-ready.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w15350

A Cure for Crime? Psycho-Pharmaceuticals and Crime Trends

This new NBER paper advances the fascinating hypothesis that the diffusion of new therapies for mental illness have significantly reduced violent crime.

A cure for Crime? Psycho-Pharmaceuticals and Crime Trends

Dave E. Marcotte, Sara Markowitz

In this paper we consider possible links between the advent and diffusion of a number of new psychiatric pharmaceutical therapies and crime rates. We describe recent trends in crime and review the evidence showing mental illness as a clear risk factor both for criminal behavior and victimization. We then briefly summarize the development of a number of new pharmaceutical therapies for the treatment of mental illness which diffused during the “great American crime decline.” We examine limited international data, as well as more detailed American data to assess the relationship between crime rates and rates of prescriptions of the main categories of psychotropic drugs, while controlling for other factors which may explain trends in crime rates. We find that increases in prescriptions for psychiatric drugs in general are associated with decreases in violent crime, with the largest impacts associated with new generation antidepressants and stimulants used to treat ADHD. Our estimates imply that about 12 percent of the recent crime drop was due to expanded mental health treatment.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15354

Behavioural Economics and Tax Policy

Via Andrew Leigh, a new NBER paper discusses behavioural economics and tax policy. I have given a number of presentations on this in the Irish context particularly in the context of the Commission on Taxation (e.g. here). The section on how to deliver tax cuts may not be too relevant here for the next year or so but the sections on simplicity and automaticity are very useful reading for people designing current tax policy.

link here

Grants or Loans?

Grants or Loans? Theoretical Issues Regarding Access and Persistence in Postsecondary Education

Lorne Carmichael, Ross Finnie; 2007

Abstract:

Most economic investigations of access to education treat an investment in college or university as if it were a financial investment offering a particular expected rate of return. Since the average measured rates of return are quite favourable, other factors such as lack of information, contrary parental influence, or "debt aversion" must be invoked to explain the unwillingness of some qualified students from poorer backgrounds to borrow money and attend. However, a model that recognizes the hardship associated with low levels of expenditure suggests that, ceteris paribus, poorer students will actually need a higher measured rate of return before they will decide to attend. The result holds even when there is an efficient student loan system. This approach can provide some normative guidance for decisions about the choice of grants or loans as vehicles for student aid, and has positive implications about the effects of grants and loans on access and persistence.

The Handbook of the Economics of Education (Volume 1)

A good chunk of this text (edited by Eric Hanushek and Finis Welch) is available as a preview courtesy of GoogleBooks. Here.

University Blog Interviews Danny McCoy

Ferdinand (sorry I dont normally just do first names but Ferdinand is just Ferdinand from now on as I still simply struggle to spell his second name) has a nice new feature on his blog containing interviews with people relevant to the University Sector. Below is an interview with Danny McCoy, new Director of IBEC that includes some comments about the relationship between IBEC and the universities.

link here

Truth, Torture and Memory

Torture techniques used on suspected terrorists by the Bush administration may have failed to get to the truth, researchers say.

Professor Shane O'Mara of Trinity College, Dublin, said the interrogation techniques had a detrimental effect on brain functions related to memory. His review is published in the journal, Trends in Cognitive Science.

BBC News story available here. Extract as follows: "Professor O'Mara said contemporary neuroscientific models of human memory showed that the hippocampus and prefrontal cortices of the brain were very important. The stress hormone, cortisol, binds to receptors in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex increasing neuronal excitability which compromises the normal functioning of the brain if it is sustained."

$500,000 Prize for the Best "Taste Profile" Model

In today's New York Times, there is a story about Netflix, the movie rental company, and how they awarded a $1 Million Prize for a statistical model. The company decided its million-dollar competition was such a good investment that it is planning another one.

The company’s challenge, begun in October 2006, was to come up with a recommendation software that could do a better job accurately predicting the movies customers would like than Netflix’s in-house software, Cinematch. To qualify for the prize, entries had to be at least 10 percent better than Cinematch.

The data set for the first contest was 100 million movie ratings, with the personally identifying information stripped off. Contestants worked with the data to try to predict what movies particular customers would prefer, and then their predictions were compared with how the customers actually did rate those movies later, on a scale of one to five stars.

The new contest is going to present the contestants with demographic and behavioral data, and they will be asked to model individuals’ “taste profiles,” the company said. The data set of more than 100 million entries will include information about renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes, genre ratings and previously chosen movies. Unlike the first challenge, the contest will have no specific accuracy target. Instead, $500,000 will be awarded to the team in the lead after six months, and $500,000 to the leader after 18 months.

Kahneman Profile

Thanks to Jeremy Clift of IMF blog for sending this profile of Daniel Kahneman

link here

External returns to education

There is a common belief that there are many other benefits to education other than hte effect on ones earnings although the evidence, it seemed to me, was underwhelming. This paper takes a different view.

How large are returns to schooling? Hint: Money isn't everything. P.Oreopoulos & K.G. Salvanes
This paper explores the many avenues by which schooling affects lifetime well-being. Experiences and skills acquired in school reverberate throughout life, not just through higher earnings. Schooling also affects the degree one enjoys work and the likelihood of being unemployed. It leads individuals to make better decisions about health, marriage, and parenting. It also improves patience, making individuals more goal-oriented and less likely to engage in risky behavior. Schooling improves trust and social interaction, and may offer substantial consumption value to some students. We discuss various mechanisms to explain how these relationships may occur independent of wealth effects, and present evidence that non-pecuniary returns to schooling are at least as large as pecuniary ones.
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15339&r=edu

Evaluating State Programmes: “Natural Experiments” and Propensity Scores

DENIS CONNIFFE, VANESSA GASH, PHILIP J. O’CONNELL

The Economic and Social Review, Vol. 31, No. 4, October, 2000, pp. 283-308

Abstract: Evaluations of programmes — for example, labour market interventions such as employment schemes and training courses — usually involve comparison of the performance of a treatment group (recipients of the programme) with a control group (non-recipients) as regards some response (gaining employment, for example). But the ideal of randomisation of individuals to groups is rarely possible in the social sciences and there may be substantial differences between groups in the distributions of individual characteristics that can affect response. Past practice in economics has been to try to use multiple regression models to adjust away the differences in observed characteristics, while also testing for sample selection bias. The Propensity Score approach, which is widely applied in epidemiology and related fields, focuses on the idea that “matching” individuals in the groups should be compared. The appropriate matching measure is usually taken to be the prior probability of programme participation. This paper describes the key ideas of the Propensity Score method and illustrates its application by reanalysis of some Irish data on training courses.

Benford's Law

Detecting Problems in Survey Data Using Benford’s Law

by George Judge & Laura Schechter

Abstract:

"It is 15:00 in Nairobi. Do you know where your enumerators are??" Good quality data is paramount for applied economic research. If the data are distorted, corresponding conclusions may be incorrect. We demonstrate how Benford’s law, the distribution that first digits of numbers in certain data sets should follow, can be used to test for data abnormalities. We conduct an analysis of nine commonly used data sets and find that much data from developing countries is of poor quality while data from the United States seems to be of better quality. Female and male respondents give data of similar quality.

The Demand for PhD IT Jobs Advertised Across the UK

IT Jobs Watch provides a perspective on the technology job market in the UK. It is possible to view (employer) demand trends and salary trends related to permanent IT jobs (citing PhD) from the start of 2004. As shown below (and also available here), demand has returned to its mid-2005 level, and is trending upwards.

The first chart provides the 3-month moving total of permanent IT jobs (citing PhD) within the UK as a proportion of the total demand within overall qualifications. The second chart shows the 3-month moving average for salaries quoted in permanent IT jobs citing PhD within the UK.

Economics and Psychology Conference - November 6th

Full details of the Economics and Psychology are available below. All welcome. Venue is the Institute of Bankers near the IFSC.

link here

Conference Administration
There will be three sessions and a keynote. Coffee will be provided in between sessions. The chairs for each session are indicated below. It is advised that presentations be stored in email accounts as well as USB-keys.

9:45 – 10:00: Introduction and Welcome

Session1: 10:00-11:20
Chair: Dr. Richard Roche

Martin Ryan, UCD, The Psychology of Survey Responses on Skills-Matching
David Comerford, UCD, Experimental Tests of Survey Expenditure Measures
Eibhlin Hudson, UCD, Measuring Socioeconomic Differences in Child Health
Michael Daly, TCD, Cortisol, Morningness and Well-Being


Session2: 11:40-1:00
Chair: Prof. Rowena Pecchenino

Dr. Richard Roche, NUIM, Neuroeconomics of Time Discounting
Dr. Pete Lunn, ESRI, What's In It For Me? A Computational Theory of Economic Exchange
Dr. Stephen Kinsella, UL, Electricity Price Auctions: An Experimental Analysis

1:00 – 2:00: Lunch


Session3: 2:00-3:20
Chair: Dr. Liam Delaney

Katherine Carman, Tilburg, TBC
Prof. Rowena Pecchenino, NUIM, TBC
Dr. Marcel Das, Tilburg, The Dutch MESS Panel


4:00: Keynote – Arie Kapteyn, Director, RAND Labor and Population

Drinks

Classroom Peer Effects and Academic Achievement: Evidence from a Chinese Middle School

SCID Working Paper 366; 07/1/08

Author(s): Katherine Carman, Lei Zhang

This paper estimates peer effects on student achievement using a panel data set obtained from a middle school in China. Two unique features of the organization of Chinese middle schools (Grades 7 to 9) and the panel data allow us to identify peer effects at classroom level; in particular, we are able to overcome difficulties that have hindered the separation of peer effects from omitted individual factors due to self-selection and from common teacher effects. First, students are assigned to a class at entry of middle school (Grade 7) and stay with their classmates together for all subjects and for all grades in middle school. In other words, any self-selection into a class occurs before the interaction with classmates. Thus, individual fixed effects can capture all omitted student and family characteristics relevant for selection. Second, each teacher of Math, English, and Chinese teaches two classes and stay with the same two classes from Grade 7 to Grade 9. This panel nature allows us to use teacher by test fixed effects to capture the time-varying common teacher effect. We estimate peer effects for Math, English, Chinese, and overall test scores separately. In a linear-in-means model controlling for both individual and teacher-by-test fixed effects, peers are found to have a positive and significant effect on math and overall test scores and a positive but insignificant effect on Chinese test scores, but no effect on English test scores. Additionally, students at the middle of the ability distribution tend to benefit from better peers, whereas students at both ends do not.

The Costs of Economic Growth

In a similar vein to some recent posts about the interaction of economic factors with social well-being, Stanford's Chad Jones has a working paper that takes a more theoretical approach:

The benefits of economic growth are widely touted in the literature. But what about the costs? Pollution, nuclear accidents, global warming, the rapid global transmission of disease, and bioengineered viruses are just some of the dangers created by technological change. How should these be weighed against the benefits, and in particular, how does the recognition of these costs affect the theory of economic growth? This paper shows that taking these costs into account has first order consequences. Under standard preferences, the value of life may rise faster than consumption, leading society to value safety over economic growth. As a result, the optimal rate of growth may be substantially lower than what is feasible, in some cases falling all the way to zero.

This approach to optimal growth seems more consistent with the thrust of the behavioural literature on smoothing.

James P Smith - Ulysses Lecture

Dear Colleagues.

On the 15th of October 2009, UCD will award the Ulysses medal to Professor James Smith, former head of the Labour and Population Centre at RAND and two-time recipient of the National Institute of Aging Merit Award. Professor Smith's lecture will take place in the Conway Lecture Theatre in the Conway Institute at 4pm. The title of the lecture is "Effects of Childhood Mental and Physical Health on Adult Socioeconomic Status". There will be coffee both before and after the lecture. Those wishing to attend, please rsvp to geary@ucd.ie

Further details of Professor's Smiths work are available on the webpages below.

http://www.rand.org/about/people/s/smith_james_p.html

http://ideas.repec.org/e/psm28.html

Commission on Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress

The report of this commission, chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, is compulsory reading for most of the people who read this blog. The lengthy report goes into particular depth about, for example, the use of subjective measures of well-being in measuring societal progress

link here

Ethics and Economics of Randomised Trials

good discussion on Tyler Cowen's blog on this

link here

Growing Up in a Recession: Beliefs and the Macroeconomy

This is the keynote at the 11th IZA/CEPR European Summer Symposium in Labour Economics that starts tomorrow:

Growing Up in a Recession: Beliefs and the Macroeconomy

Do generations growing up during recessions have different socio-economic
beliefs than generations growing up in good times? We study the relationship
between recessions and beliefs by matching macroeconomic shocks during
early adulthood with self-reported answers from the General Social Survey.
Using time and regional variations in macroeconomic conditions to identify the
effect of recessions on beliefs, we show that individuals growing up during
recessions tend to believe that success in life depends more on luck than on
effort, support more government redistribution, but are less confident in public institutions. Moreover, we find that recessions have a long-lasting effect on individuals’ beliefs.

Paola Giuliano (UCLA) & Antonio Spilimbergo (IMF)

Chernoff Faces

For those interested in visulaisation, "Chernoff Faces" display multivariate data in the shape of a human face. The individual parts, such as eyes, ears, mouth and nose represent values of the variables by their shape, size, placement and orientation. The idea behind using faces is that humans easily recognize faces and notice small changes without difficulty.

Like Father, Like Son? A Note on the Intergenerational Transmission of IQ Scores

Like Father, Like Son? A Note on the Intergenerational Transmission of IQ Scores
by Sandra E. Black, Paul Devereux, Kjell G. Salvanes
published in: Economics Letters, 2009, 105 (1), 138-140

Abstract:
More able parents tend to have more able children. While few would question the validity of this statement, there is little large-scale evidence on the intergenerational transmission of IQ scores. Using a larger and more comprehensive dataset than previous work, we are able to estimate the intergenerational correlation in IQ scores, examining not just average correlations but also how this relationship varies for different subpopulations. We find that there is substantial intergenerational transmission of IQ scores; an increase in father’s IQ at age 18 of 10% is associated with a 3.2% increase in son’s IQ at the same age. This relationship holds true no matter how we break the data. This effect is much larger than our estimated elasticity of intergenerational transmission of income of approximately .2.

Economic Advice and Political Decisions

thanks to "mostly economics blog" for pointing out this excellent article by Alan Blinder on the "clash of civilisations" between economists and policy makers. Married folks will particularly enjoy the metaphor of policy advice as being like a good marriage. We are in the process in Ireland and elsewhere of thinking through the role economics and economists should play in policy.

link here

France To Use Happiness As Economic Indicator

"French President Nicolas Sarkozy has asked world leaders to join a 'revolution' in the measurement of economic progress by dropping their obsession with gross domestic product to account for factors such as health-care availability and leisure time."

From the Huffington Post.

The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels

James J. Heckman and Paul A. LaFontaine: Geary WP/28/2008. The authors establish that:

(a) the true high school graduation rate is substantially lower than widely used measures;
(b) the U.S. graduation rate peaked in the early 1970s;
(c) majority/minority differentials are substantial and have not converged over the past 35 years;
(d) lower post-1970 rates are not solely due to increasing immigrant and minority populations;
(e) their findings explain part of the slowdown in college attendance and the rise in college wage premiums;
(f) growing high school graduation differentials by gender help explain increasing male-female college attendance gaps.

Placebo Prices

Economists will know this as the producer surplus.

Graduates willing to settle for lower pay?

Of 338 final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students at UCD, Trinity, Dublin City University and Dublin Institute of Technology, over two-thirds are worried about graduating into a recession, according to a survey from last month by the Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. Story here.

Teacher Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence from India

This paper uses an RCT to evaluate the effect of performance pay for teachers. Well, it works but the effect sizes look small to me: about a 30% bonus to up the standard deviation by about .2? An expensive policy I think.

Teacher Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence
Karthik Muralidharan & Venkatesh Sundararaman

Performance pay for teachers is frequently suggested as a way of improving education outcomes in schools, but the theoretical predictions regarding its effectiveness are ambiguous and the empirical evidence to date is limited and mixed. We present results from a randomized evaluation of a teacher incentive program implemented across a large representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The program provided bonus payments to teachers based on the average improvement of their students' test scores in independently administered learning assessments (with a mean bonus of 30% of monthly pay). At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in control schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations in math and language tests respectively. They scored significantly higher on "conceptual" as well as "mechanical" com ponents
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15323&r=edu

Why So Serious? More Like, Why So Happy?

Americans of all ages are reporting higher levels of happiness now... compared to the start of the year. Catherine Rampell discusses this on the NYT Economix Blog, based on a Gallup release about an upturn in national well-being. Do Americans think they are on the way out of the Great Recession?

Dan Bretnitz

Has anyone read this book on Innovation and the State, discussing the development of IT in Israel, Taiwan and Ireland in the 1990s?

The MIT PolSci 2005 PhD thesis this is based on (I presume) is available online - here (though you can't print it out, or cut and paste from it) The PhD abstract is as follows\;

One of the most unexpected changes of the 1990s is that firms in a number of emerging economies not previously known for their high-technology industries have leapfrogged to the forefront in new Information Technologies (IT). Surprisingly, from the perspective of comparative political economy theories, the IT industries of these countries use different business models and have carved out different positions in the global IT production networks. Of these emerging economies, the Taiwanese, Israeli, and Irish have successfully nurtured the growth of their IT industries. This dissertation sets out to establish that emerging economies have more than one option for developing their high technology industries. Moreover, it advances a theoretical framework for analyzing how different choices lead to long-term consequences and to the development of successful and radically different industrial systems. Hence, this dissertation strives to give politics - the art and profession of creating alternatives and the social struggles of choosing between, and acting on, them - the importance that it seems to have lost in the social sciences. The research focuses on the role of the state in shaping the structure of the IT industry in Israel, Ireland, and Taiwan.

It argues that the developmental path of the IT industry is influenced by four critical decisions by the state. First, decisions about how to acquire the necessary R&D skills influence which organizations - public or private - play a leading role in innovation. Second, state decisions about financing significantly affect both the R&D resources available to the industry and the scope of R&D activity. Third, state efforts to develop local leading companies have long-term consequences for the industry's opportunity structure. Fourth, state decisions regarding foreign firms and investors within and outside national borders affect the resources and the information that the industry receives from its customers, as well as the diffusion and development of specific innovative capabilities. Of particular importance are state decisions that develop specific links between local and foreign companies, investors, and financial markets. Overall, the dissertation utilizes this framework to explain the divergent development of the IT industry in Taiwan, Israel, and Ireland.

Dropbox

Thanks to John Regan for pointing me towards the DropBox software. It comes with 2GB free and syncs your files online and across your computers. The website says it does the following:

- Syncs files of any size or type
- Shares large files and photos easily
- Automatically produces online backups
- Tracks and undoes changes to files

StereoTypes

"There must be more to life...
Than stereotypes"

So goes the famous song by Blur, but this doesn't ring true for those of us with a keen interest in analysing ordinal outcome variables. According to Mark Lunt (writing for Stata.com), one common approach, known as the Proportional Odds (PO) Model, is implemented in Stata as ordered logit.

If the assumptions of the PO model are not satisfied, an alternative is to treat the outcome as categorical, rather than ordinal, and use multinomial logistic regression in Stata. It is also possible to use Anderson's "Stereotype Ordinal Regression (SOR) Model", which according to Lunt, "can be thought of as imposing ordering constraints on a multinomial model. The multinomial model provides the best possible fit to the data, at the cost of a large number of parameters which can be difficult to interpret. Stereotype regression aims to reduce the number of parameters by imposing constraints, without reducing the adequacy of the fit."

The stereotype approach is also discussed in Scott Long's book on "Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables using Stata" (exact page opens up), and in an epidemiology review article by Annath and Kleinbaum which takes a broad look at regression models for ordinal responses. A relevant publication by Mark Lunt (in 'Statistics in Medicine'; 2005) is available here: "Prediction of ordinal outcomes when the association between predictors and outcome differs between outcome levels".

Finally, those with an interest in anchoring vignettes may be interested in this work by Johnson that was published in Psychomatrika less than two years ago: "Discrete Choice Models for Ordinal Response Variables - A Generalization of the Stereotype Model". Johnson discusses the case of the generalized stereotype model, which includes category-specific random effects due to individual differences in response style. "...Unlike standard random utility models the generalized stereotype model is better suited for ordinal response variables and can be interpreted as a kind of unidimensional unfolding model".

Literacy, Handwriting Problems and Legibility

Those interested in research on literacy may find this interesting. It seems entirely possible that the American education system may abandon the Palmer handwriting method for other typographical design rules.

Inter generational effects

Intergenerational transmission of human capital in early childhood

By:	Coneus, Katja Sprietsma, Maresa

It is a well-known fact that the level of parents' education is strongly correlated with the educational achievement of their children. In this paper,we shed light on the potential channels through which human capital is transmitted from mothers to their children in early childhood. The main channels through which maternal human capital benefits the child's verbal and social skills are birth weight and father's support. Moreover,reading stories to the child is most relevant for the transmision of verbal skills whereas for social skills, a crucial channel for maternal human capital is the attendance of institutional childcare.
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:09031&r=edu

Complex Systems and Computational Social Science Roundtable

I've also added the Complex Systems and Computational Social Science Roundtable to the Seminar Listings. Wednesdays 3pm to 5pm. Organised by Diane Payne (Diane.Payne@ucd.ie)

16th September 2009
Diane Payne
UCD
Micro-processes, macro-outcomes for collective decision making

23rd September 2009
Mandy Lee
TCD
Multidisciplinary team working in Irish healthcare: case studies using social network analysis.

7th October 2009
Padraig Cunningham
UCD
Centrality Measures in Social Networks

21st October 2009
Petra Ahrweiler
UCD
Network Models, Governance, and R&D Collaboration Networks

4th November 2009
Tahar Kechadi
UCD
The Value of Questioning What You Know

18th November 2009
Tahar Kechadi
UCD
The Data Wave: Data Management and Mining

25th November 2009
Uwe Obermeier
UCD
CSCS PhD Presentation

20th January 2010
Brendan Murphy
UCD
Model Selection and Model Averaging

27th January 2010
Jos Elkink
UCD
An agent-based model of the international diffusion of democracy

10th February 2010
Nial Friel
UCD
Markov random field models for social network analysis

17th February
Michel Schilperoord
UCD
Simulating Innovation Networks and Regional Development

24th February 2010
Claire Gormley
UCD
Statistical modeling and social networks

24th March 2010
Conrad Lee
UCD
CSCS PhD Presentation

31st March 2010
Dan Maher
UCD
CSCS PhD Presentation

14th April 2010
Deirdre Kirke
NUI Maynooth
Computational Social Science and Sociological Theory

NUI Galway Seminars

I have added a link to the sidebar for the NUI Galway series organised by Brendan Kennelly and colleagues.

September - 2009
ECONOMICS SEMINAR: Speaker: Gregory Connor, NUI Maynooth. TITLE: "Irish Risky Lending Gap".
Fri 18 Sep
1.00 p.m. Friday 18th September, 2009
To be announced

Economics Seminar
ECONOMICS SEMINAR: Speaker: Hugh Kelley, NUI Galway. TITLE: "The relative influences of land owner and landscape heterogeneity in an agent based model of land use".
Fri 25 Sep
1.00 p.m. Friday 25th September, 2009
To be announced

Economics Seminar
October - 2009
ECONOMICS SEMINAR: Speaker: Brenda Gannon, NUI, Galway. TITLE: "Exploring the relationship between cost of disability, standard of living and unobserved individual effects: An application of the Generalised ordered response model"
Fri 2 Oct
1.00 p.m. Friday 2nd October, 2009
To be announced

Economics Seminar
ECONOMICS SEMINAR: Speaker: Vani Borooah, University of Ulster. TITLE: "Linguistic Elitism in the Irish Labour Market: How much Advantage is there to Workers in Ireland Speaking Irish? Evidence from the 2006 Census".
Fri 16 Oct
1.00 p.m. Friday 16 th October, 2009
To be announced

Economics Seminar
ECONOMICS SEMINAR: Speaker: Rod Garrett, University of Santa Barbara and Bank of England. TITLE: To be announced.
Fri 23 Oct
1.00 p.m. Friday 23rd October, 2009.
To be announced.

Economics Seminar
ECONOMICS SEMINAR: Speaker: Liam Delaney, University College Dublin. TITLE: Angela's Ashes to the Celtic: Early Conditions and Adult Health in Ireland.
Fri 30 Oct
1.00 p.m. Friday 30th October, 2009.
To be announce

Economics Seminar
November - 2009
ECONOMICS SEMINAR: Speaker: Ron Davies, University College Dublin. TITLE: "Tax Competition in an Expanding European Union".
Fri 6 Nov
1.00 p.m. Friday 6th November, 2009.
To be announced.

Economics Seminar
SPEAKER: Catia Batista,Trinity College Dublin. "Do Migrants Improve Governance at Home? Evidence from a Voting Experiment".
Fri 13 Nov
1.00 p.m. Friday 13th November, 2009.
To be announced.

Economics Seminar
ECONOMICS SEMINAR: Speaker: Matt Cole, University of Oregon; University College Dublin. TITLE: "Optimal Tariffs with FDI: The Evidence".
Fri 20 Nov
1.00 p.m. Friday 20th November, 2009.
To be announced.

Economics Seminar
ECONOMICS SEMINAR: Speaker: Sean O’Riain, Maynooth University. "Growth, Social Reproduction and Governance".
Fri 27 Nov
1.00 p.m. Friday 27th November, 2009.
To be announced.

Economics Seminar

IRCHSS Scholars

For those who want to put a picture to the name (and having seen the picture you will remember the maxim "be careful what you wish for"). I am in the middle. Eibhlin Hudson, David Comerford, Alan Fernihough and Martin Ryan are from left to right. These are four researchers here and PhD students in the School of Economics who have won IRCHSS scholarships. Supervisors include myself, David Madden, Cormac O'Grada and Colm Harmon. Eibhlin is examining socioeconomic differences in child health, David is working on behavioural economics of decision and affect, Alan is working on long-run determinants of health and Martin is looking at outcomes in higher education.

Ireland Suicide Report

The pdf of the report referred to by Kevin is below. It contains very valuable information on time trends, age composition, methods of suicide and related information. Looking at the basic time series of suicide should give people making exaggerated claims about the likely impact of the recession on suicide some pause for thought. Certainly, risk factors for some groups will be increasing and in particular cases alarmingly so. But in general, the evidence on gdp and suicide is very mixed as can at least partly be seen by the fact that suicides were so high during the Irish economic boom.

link here

Suicide trends

This story from RTE provides welcome news that the suicide rate has fallen. It contains the following remark "Today's report shows a continued reduction in suicides each year since 2003. However, it says it is still too early to say whether this trend is significant." But why so hesitant:why is it too early to say? If they mean significance in the normal sense of the word, then the only thing that matters is the size of the effect, surely?
If they mean statistical significance, I am not sure that makes sense either: we are talking about changes in a population parameter here so statistical inference doesn't come into it? That is, if the rate falls then it falls, end of story. I suppose this is related to the hoary old question of what t statistics mean when your data is the population & not a sample.
Actually the news is even better: as the article notes "Given the population growth, the rate of suicide is now the lowest since 1993, when suicide was decriminalised".

http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0902/suicide.html

Twins as an economic model

I have been somewhat sceptical about the use of twins as an economic model for some time. Just because its a good biological model doesn't mean that it will work for social sciences. Here is a paper that confirms my prejudices:

The Co-twin Methodology and Returns to Schooling – Testing a Critical Assumption

	Sandewall, Örjan , Cesarini, David & Johannesson, Magnus

Twins-based estimates of the return to schooling feature prominently in the labor economics literature. The validity of such estimates hinges critically on the assumption that within-pair variation in schooling is explained by factors which are unrelated to wage earning ability. This paper develops a framework for testing this assumption, and finds, using a unique dataset of monozygotic twins, strong evidence against it. Differences in adolescent IQ test scores predict within-pair variation in educational attainment, and including IQ in the wage equation causes within-pair point estimates for the returns to schooling to decline significantly. Our results thus cast doubt on the validity of estimates derived from the co-twin literature.

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:0806&r=edu

Do Universities Generate Agglomeration Spillovers?

The debate on social returns to universities is particularly important now given the pressure on public funding. The following study is of some relevance:

Do Universities Generate Agglomeration Spillovers? Evidence from Endowment Value Shocks
Shawn Kantor, Alexander Whalley
This paper quantifies the extent and magnitude of agglomeration spillovers from a formal institution whose sole mission is the creation and dissemination of knowledge -- the research university. We use the fact that universities follow a fixed endowment spending policy based on the market value of their endowments to identify the causal effect of the density of university activity on labor income in the non-education sector in large urban counties. Our instrument for university expenditures is based on the interaction between each university's initial endowment level at the start of the study period and the variation in stock market shocks over the course of the study period. We find modest but statistically significant spillover effects of university activity. The estimates indicate that a 10% increase in higher education spending increases local non-education sector labor income by about 0.5%.
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15299&r=edu

Evidence on Class size effects at university

The econometric evidence on the effects of class size on academic achievement is mostly at 2nd or 3rd level. The paper below considers the case of Italian universities:

Effects of Class Size on Achievement of College Students
De Paola, Maria & Scoppa, Vincenzo
In this paper we investigate the effects of class size on the achievements of a sample of college students enrolled at a middle-sized Italian public university. To estimate the effects of class size we exploit the exogenous variations in class size determined by a maximum class size rule introduced by the 2001 Italian university reform. From our analysis it emerges that large teaching classes produce negative effects on student performance measured both in terms of the grades obtained in exams and the probability of passing exams. These results are robust to the use of a matching estimator.
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:16945&r=edu

Behavioral Finance & Economics Research

The 2009 Behavioral Finance & Economics Research Symposium will be held on September 23-25, 2009 at Hotel Monaco-Chicago. The program is available here.

This link is the homepage for the Academy of Behavioral Finance and Economics.

Science and Technology Policy

Some recent defences of spending on science and technology in Ireland have come from Professor Luke O'Neill (if you look closely at this post you will see a remarkable slip of the tongue by yours truly) and Frank Gannon, Director of SFI.

These introduce a number of things into debate. O'Neill's argument brings in the research of Murphy and Topel examining the benefits of medical research, something that should be read by anyone serious about this debate. Gannon directs the debate specifically toward the functioning of large SFI programmes such as CSET's and Strategic Research Clusters. It is extremely welcome that these terms are now starting to enter the debate as ultimately this is what taxpayers are funding and ultimately the success of these initiatives or otherwise will determine whether the investment has been worthwhile. The comment below clearly is something that merits further comment and in general a more open debate about the specific outputs of IRCSET, IRCHSS, SFI, PRTLI and so on would advance this public discussion a great deal.

"The impact of the CSETs is well recognized and we are confident that the same will be true of the SRCs in a short time. In fact, the surprising result that SFI can report is that its investments when looked at as a portfolio have yielded positive commercial results in a 3-5 year period"

ISNE Programme

The organising committee have done a great job in putting together this years conference. There are almost 60 speakers in three parallel sessions going on over the day. Full details including the programme are available below

link here

Student Attendance

A nice post on college student attendance by Stephen Kinsella

link here