JobBridge: a scheme with a job to do?

Yesterday's Irish Times has an article on the government's new internship scheme JobBridge.

Exiting Unemployment: The Role of Coping Strategies

Exiting unemployment: How do program effects depend on individual coping strategies?

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Author Info

Andersen, Signe Hald

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• Signe Hald Andersen

Abstract

This paper analyses if individual coping strategies explain heterogeneous effects of participation in active labour market programs (ALMPs) on reemployment probabilities for the unemployed. I use survey data linked with administrative data from Statistics Denmark and focus on respondents who are unemployed or participating in ALMPs (n = 1310). To account for selection bias I analyse the data with a mixed logit model. I find that the coping strategies displayed by the unemployed persons explain heterogeneous effects of participation in ALMPs.

VoX Interview with Robert Aumann

Fascinating short interview with 2005 Nobel winner Robert Aumann on rationality, games and conflict - link here. Interesting discussion of the work of Kahneman and Tversky contrasted with that of Vernon Smith.

Health and Well-Being of the Irish in England

My paper with James Smith and Alan Fernihough is available as an IZA Working Paper linked here. I am currently working on a funding proposal to directly survey the Irish-born living in England, and in London particularly. Very happy to correspond with people interested in this group.

Exporting Poor Health: The Irish in England

The Irish-born population in England is in worse health than both the native population and the Irish population in Ireland, a reversal of the commonly observed healthy migrant effect. Recent birth-cohorts living in England and born in Ireland, however, are healthier than the English population. The substantial Irish health penalty arises principally for cohorts born between 1920 and 1960. This paper attempts to understand the processes that generated this migrant health pattern. Our results suggest a strong role for early childhood conditions and economic selection in driving the dynamics of health differences between the Irish-born migrants and White English populations.

Publish or perish and the perils of peer review

My first posting to this new blog should be something significant even profound. Instead I have just re-posted my own blog:

Peer review is the certification process by which academic research is judged. To get a paper published in a journal, it has to get past 1,2,3 or more referees as well as the editor.

But once it does, hey presto it is “peer reviewed”. Anyone in the business, and probably many outside, know there are problems with the system. As authors, we have all had the experience of being messed around by journal editors and referees. War stories about journals are part of the stock-and-trade of the common room. We all have seen lousy papers published- written by other people of course. Part of the problem is that there are so many journals so with a bit of determination you can get even rubbish published somewhere. That imposes a big demand for referees/reviewers for a tiresome, thankless task (although I think refereeing papers can help one become a better author, to a point). The pressure from funding agencies and universities to produce papers is also a problem.

David Colquhoun, a British pharmacologist, has a nice piece here on this issue particularly from the perspective of the “hard sciences” although it sounds broadly applicable.

New Blog - Dublin Microeconomics Blog

The Geary blog closed in April as can be seen by the posts below.

I have been talking to people who were interested in that blog about the best way to proceed. Both Kevin Denny and I have kept personal blogs running, Kevin posting more frequently on his than I on mine. Also, a number of us have twitter accounts. But both Kevin and myself felt that a community-blog with a similar scope to the previous one would be worth pursuing. I am working on developing a behavioural economics blog with a European policy focus and I will put something up on that soon. But I think it would be good to get a blog similar to the old one back in action.

From my point of view, having moved universities I thought it would be tricky to keep a blog going that had a UCD institutional affiliation, even if an informal one. Having said that, it would seem a waste to just get rid of the old posts and the link structures on the sidebars. So, having taken all this into consideration, it seems the best solution is simply to revamp the previous blog, keeping the previous posts and links but changing the url and title.

We will post here from now on. I will improve the design over the next couple of weeks but if you are very worried about design then this probably isn't the forum for you! The content will be very similar to the previous blog - a mix of behavioural economics, microeconomics, statistics and so on. Cross-posting from other blogs is fine.

Suggestions via the comments or through email very welcome.