Thought for the day

"I look forward to faculty meetings. It's like going to the zoo."

A tenured colleague of mine who, for obvious reasons, will remain unnamed.

More accolades for UM

Michigan does very well in the Shanghai university rankings and the diag is honored as well.

Gladwell on Lanning

UM doctoral alum Jon Lanning, now teaching at Bryn Mawr, gets attention from Malcolm Gladwell in a column about why it is helpful to think about professional sports franchises as art objects rather than businesses.

A good bit:

... it is one of the surreal qualities of professional sports that they are as welcoming and lucrative for those owners who chose to behave like 14-year-olds as they are of those owners who chose to behave like grown-ups.

Jon's paper is about the racial integration of professional baseball and, among other things, estimates the costs (in foregone profits) that owners implicitly paid to keep their teams white. An apparently ungated version of Jon's paper is here. Gladwell uses it to motivate the general idea of owners getting psychic returns from their teams.

Musgrave Prize

UM graduate student David Agrawal won the Musgrave prize for the best paper by an economist under 40 presented at the International Institute for Public Finance (IIPF) conference held in Ann Arbor last week.

Given that nearly everyone at the conference was under 40, and that there was stiff competition not only from faculty but also from some of our other graduate students, I would say that this is quite an honor.

So, congratulations David!

Oh, and David is on the job market this year. Hint, hint.

Addendum: not sure why the web page lists David's affiliation as the University of Copenhagen. He's not even Danish.

Addendum 2: the winning paper can be found on David's web page. It is the one about the tax gradient.

We're #21

Michigan comes out in 21st place in a new set of rankings of undergraduate institutions.

Our niche may consist of combining big time college athletics with a top flight research university that also cares about teaching.

Perfect venue for an intimate wedding

You can now rent Michigan Stadium - a.k.a. the "Big House" - for events.

Just you and 107,000 of your closest friends.

Glad to see that the athletic departments is exploring novel ways to raise money.

Club Michigan: Toronto edition

I spent an afternoon in Toronto last week wearing my Michigan baseball cap. This yielded the following Club Michigan encounters:

1. The counter person at the vegan restaurant in the St. Lawrence market that my wife went to for her lunch said that her father had attended Michigan on a tennis scholarship and that she loved driving down to Ann Arbor to see football games.

2. A young man in Yorkville offered a hearty "Go Blue!" and a smile as he walked by.

3. A street musician at Bay and Bloor spotted my cap, called out to me, and then did a perfect rendition of "Hail to the Victors" on his various instruments. Turns out he is from Detroit, and was admitted to UM back in the day, but decided not to enroll so that he could pursue his goal of being the "next Jimi Hendrix". You can meet this very same musician at the Ann Arbor Art Fair this week.

Tax holidays

Dan Hamermesh blogs about the economics of tax holidays on the Freakonomics blog.

Of course, recent Michigan economics Ph.D. Adam Cole is the world expert on tax holidays. You can find his papers about them on his web page.

Real estate news near Lorch

Apparently the Memorial Christian Church located just down the street from Lorch Hall, home of the UM economics department, may not turn into a fraternity after all, or maybe it will.

I am rather surprised the university has not bought the property given its close proximity to campus.

Rebecca Blank

An interview with Rebecca Blank, former dean of the Ford School at UM, and apparently under consideration to replace Goolsbee at CEA.

Via Brad DeLong, who thinks Becky is not Keynesian enough or is but is toeing the administration line. A third, more prosaic, explanation is that she is famously careful with other people's money, which is why she was the perfect dean during the construction of the Ford School's new building.

Bush II and Juan Cole

You do not have to agree with everything (or, indeed, anything) my UM colleague Juan Cole has to say to be rather disturbed by recent stories about the Bush II administrative sending the spooks after him or trying to blackball him on the think tank circuit. The latter business is just sort of petty, and sad as well to the extent that it reflects a view that is just best not to ever hear an opinion that conflicts with one's preconceived ideas.

Of course, such antics are, sadly, in recent years a bipartisan affair. Recall that the Clinton administration used the IRS to go after its critics.

The fundamental problem, of course, is that the very sort of people who eagerly seek to work in the government are often also the sort of people who put party politics and short term political gain ahead of the law and the long run maintenance of a free society.

Oh, and I am not related to the former CIA official called "Jeffrey Smith" mentioned in this version of the Juan Cole spying story. Imagine my surprise at the existence of someone else, no relation so far as I know, with such a unique name.

Hat tip: Jon Lanning

Atlantic Causal Inference Conference

I spent the last two days at the Atlantic Causal Inference conference which, this year, was held far away from the Atlantic at Michigan's School of Public Health.

The conference was great inter-disciplinary fun, as it included statisticians, biotstatisticians, epidemiologists and even a few economists. I got to meet some famous people from other fields and also learned a lot (though there were a couple of presentations where simultaneous inter-disciplinary translation would have helped).

Two quotes that I liked well enough to write down:

"My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence; me, I study natural stupidity" - Amos Tversky

"Matching is an attempt to approximate what reweighting is doing directly" - Justin McCrary

In addition to providing the Tversky quote, Sander Greenland's keynote speech taught me the term "nullism", which indicates excessive reverence for the null hypothesis in classical hypothesis testing. I expect that term to come in handy in future.

Faculty and staff salary growth at UM

The original Detroit Free Press piece and the university response.

I think the university is largely correct here though they do undermine the air of transparency with meaningless (and potentially misleading) bits such as:

In two of the last six years (FY 2004 and FY 2010), the president, provost, vice presidents, and deans received no increase in their base salaries.

That is a bit like pointing out (correctly) that there have been literally thousands of days on which I worked at UM but did not receive a raise. Yes, sure, but irrelevant to any of several possible questions of interest.

My own experience with the university's salary and benefits system, both as a regular faculty member and as part of an internal salary study team, is that the university's administrative systems related to payroll are so arcane as to make Fizzbin look like checkers by comparison. It is not at all surprising that the Free Press messed things up, though perhaps they should have been more careful before publishing to make sure they understood what they were doing.

Of course, neither the original article nor the university response address deeper questions about whether the levels of administrative faculty employment and pay, or their arrangement across levels and task areas, are the correct ones.

Foiled by FOIA

The UM's official publication attempts to explain what, exactly, is covered by state and federal Freedom of Information Act requirements.

Unfortunately, the article does more to illustrate the sometimes inability of university administrators to communicate clearly than anything else. After reading the article, for example, I am still unclear about whether or not an email I sent to a co-author about the Wisconsin demonstrations would have to be released or not, which seems like the key question surrounding the Mackinac Institute's FOIA request, and whether or not the answer to that question depends on, for example, whether I am a faculty member in a labor-related unit and/or whether or not I am engaged in research on issues related to unions.

The key paragraph is this one:

Email messages are considered public records under the FOIA if they deal with university business or are maintained by the university related to university business. The law specifically excludes computer software from the definition of public record.

So, my hypothetical email is presumably not university business, but it is "maintained" by the university in the sense that it sits (essentially forever, as I rarely delete emails) on the university's disks. Or maybe it is university business if I work at a unit that studies labor relations or if my research has to do with unions? Does it matter if my union-related research is funded by a grant run through the university? The line about software seems oddly irrelevant - how many faculty will write a program to express their views?

Sigh.

A longer title for yours truly

As of yesterday, and subject to approval by the Regents of the university, I now have a "zero budget" appointment at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. A "zero budget" appointment is Michigan-speak for what most other places call a "courtesy appointment". Among other things, this means I can now refer to myself as "Professor of Economics and Public Policy."

I sought the appointment because I hope to become somewhat more involved at the Ford School. I taught at the Harris School at Chicago during my gradual student days and really enjoyed interacting with the MPP students there, as well as with the multi-disciplinary faculty. I expect the same to be true at Michigan.

One nice feature of both Michigan and Chicago is that their policy schools are not named after people I would be embarrassed to be associated with, like John F. Kennedy or Woodrow Wilson.

A short history of grading at UM

I would not have guessed that UM was completely pass / fail into the 20th century.

I like this bit about early UM president James Angell:

Over his 38 years as president he argued repeatedly that "broader, heartier, better work" was done by those who studied simply "for the sake of learning" than by those who were merely scrapping for grades. "A collegiate course cannot be wisely shaped with primary reference to driving drones to work," he declared. "It should provide every manly and noble incentive to worthy achievement."

There is no question that it is more fun to teach students who actually care about learning. And the fraction of such students is surprisingly high at Michigan. I suspect those students learn more, and learn more usefully, than their grade-grubbing, future-salary obsessed colleagues.

Advancing the debate, or scoring points?

I am not quite sure what the point of these email FOIAs is other than to score points in the day-to-day mudslinging of the red and blue teams. The Mackinac Center's time would be better spent on making the substantive case against public sector labor unions.

At the same time, the ultimate responsibility here, which seems to be missed in all the outrage, lies with the legislators who drafted FOIA laws that can be abused for fishing expeditions like this one.

Hat tip: Sue Dynarski on Facebook

More pols at graduation

Michigan governor Rick Snyder has been selected to speak at Michigan's commencement this spring. As with President Obama, a couple of years ago, I think this is a bad idea. Politics embodies values that are the opposite of those of the university, and having a partisan speaker means alienating many of the students, parents and others in attendance at graduation, thereby likely reducing future donations to the university. I would much prefer either cultural figures appropriate to the university or, even better, faculty who are good speakers, as at Chicago.

UM Next Gen IT

I am generally suspicious of the centralization of IT services - partly as a result of negative experiences with it at UWO when IT moved from the department to the faculty level, but most of what Michigan is undertaking as part of its Next Gen initiative seems like reasonable responses to recent developments in technology.

From Michigan skit night

I liked this the best of all the bits at skit night.