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.

Faculty outreach

The Plan notes that English Departments often get requests for faculty help with grammar. The response is to send the supplicants off to the local library (?) for assistance.

On the other hand, at least at Michigan, the statistics department runs a consulting operation designed both to help researchers in other departments on campus and to give their gradual students practice at consultation, as many of them will indeed go on to do statistical consulting. When contacted by people off campus, I suspect the response from many statistics faculty members is to quote an hourly rate.

Seems to me that English departments ought to follow statistics. They would get bonus points from deans another higher-ups, who love this sort of helping. Or they could make some money by charging for the service. I wonder, though, if the real issue is some concern about whether the average level of grammatical knowledge among English department gradual students these days is actually higher than that of outsiders.

Brainy career advice

I try not to link to things that MR links to (because I think my readers are approximately a small subset of theirs) but this piece of career advice from a neuroscientist is really good.

Teaching MBAs

This ad for an economist to teach MBAs at the Johns Hopkins University business school features the following unusual bit:

The successful candidate(s) for this position will be subject to a pre-employment background check.

To teach MBAs? What are they checking for - bad taste in wine?

Bonus question: should be happy that my former UM colleague Mario Macis passed the background check or concerned that the check was instituted only after he got hired? :)

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Journal Spam II?

Consider the following email:

From: Michael Taylor

Date: June 13, 2011 1:29:47 AM EDT

To: undisclosed-recipients:;

Subject: reviewing request from the Applied Economics Research Bulletin

The Applied Economics Research Bulletin, which is a non-commercial alternative to Economics Letters, has received the two attached manuscripts for possible publication as a Peer-Reviewed Working Paper. Compared to Regular Papers, the working series is only lightly reviewed since the main focus is on quick and wide dissemination. We were wondering if you could give us your thoughts on both manuscripts. If you are very busy and don't have the time to give a detailed assessment, we would appreciate just a thumbs up or thumbs down indication regarding the manuscripts.

Thank you and best regards,

Mike

--

Michael Taylor

Applied Economics Research Bulletin

http://berkeleymath.com/BerkeleyJournal.aspx

questions@BerkeleyMath.com

The web page for this new journal appears here and it appears to be a serious enterprise, if I may define serious as "having a bunch of my friends on the editorial board". I also like the idea of a lightly refereed working paper series. This has the potential to fill a real need for graduate students and other scholars who are not members of one of the organizations, such as the IZA or the NBER, with widely-circulated working paper series. At the moment, such scholars have no good way of establishing "property rights" to their work by circulating it with an authenticated date.

My one concern about the new journal is that they seem to be finding their referees by simply sending out papers to graduate students at top departments without checking overmuch to see whether the papers really fit the student's research interests. I say this because (at least) two different Michigan economics graduate students received the above email. One of them is a micro development economist and the other an economist of education. They received the same two papers to review, one on foreign direct investment and one on an applied econometrics topic.

So, not journal spam, but maybe some refinement in the process for selecting referees is in order?

Addendum: I have now confirmed that a third Michigan economics graduate student, this one a macro-economist, also received the same email and the same two papers.

Hat tip: anonymous UM economics grad student

Dental students at play

I think this outdoes the economics skit night videos for sheer geekiness.

Alumni association journal access!

The University of Washington Alumni Association, of which I am a member, is now offering access to on-line scholarly and popular journals as one of its membership perks.

I mention this for two reasons. First, I know there are some UW alumni who read the blog and who might value this perk if they are not already members. Second, and much more broadly, this is but one more milestone on the long road to major changes in academic publishing, as hard copies slowly disappear and, I suspect, for-profit journals disappear along with them.

On the multiplication of weasel words

Economists and other social scientists love their weasel words (and phrases) such as "suggests", "may mean" and "seems to indicate". Sometimes these weasely words serve as a helpful shorthand for the fact that the estimates being discussed have standard errors, or that the a given empirical pattern may have multiple causes. Other times they just signal authorial timidity or a desire to avoid full responsibility for one's conclusions.

Reading a gradual student paper this morning, I was reminded that regardless of the reason for including weasel words, one of my rules of writing is that a given sentence should have at most one weasel word or phrase. Consider the sentence

This suggests that the longitudinal weights may underweight non-participants.

To accomplished the desired level of weaseliness, the writer (who is actually quite a clear and organized writer) does not need both "suggests" and "may". The sentence

This suggests that the longitudinal weights underweight non-participants.

does just fine at conveying the intended meaning, as does the sentence

My findings indicate that the longitudinal weights may underweight non-participants.

The bottom line: one weasel word or phrase per sentence.

As an aside, in the context of the paper from which it is drawn, the sentence actually does not require any weasel words at all, as the results shown in the paper clearly indicate underweighting of non-participants. But that, perhaps, is a subject for a different post.

Advice on academic publishing

The Spring 2011 CSWEP newsletter includes some short articles giving advice on the academic publishing process. I liked the ones by Robert Moffitt and Patty Anderson the best but all four are useful.

I would emphasize the following points that come up in one or more of the articles:

1. Do not resend a paper that has been rejected at one journal to another journal without revising it in light of the comments received. I can tell you from personal experience that if you get the same reviewer at the second journal, s/he will be really pissed that you have ignored the initial reports. When this happens, it sends a strong signal to the reviewer and to the editor (who is sure to hear about) that you do not care overmuch about the quality of your work.

2. Be sure that the paper you submit is easy to read. Poorly labeled tables, repeated bits of text, typos and such all signal lack of care; you do not want the reviewers and the editor to think that you are similarly careless with the theoretical and empirical substance of your paper.

3. Get some comments from gradual students, friends or colleagues and do an "internal" revision before sending out the paper to a journal. This is less of an issue with co-authored publications, where presumably the two co-authors are reviewing each other's work as the paper is drafted.

Science (the thing) and Science (the journal)

David McKenzie on a new study from some non-economists in Science that purports to show that teachers do not matter and methods do.

I am stunned that this got published in Science. The fact that it did has led to a negative revision in my beliefs about the quality of the research it lets through its editorial process. Though even before this, I would likely have applied a somewhat weakened version of this theory of social science publications in medical journals to Science.

The key here is that the dispersion of knowledge regarding study design (or identification, if you prefer) among practicing researchers, and thus among editors and referees, is, on average, much weaker outside of economics. Of course, many disciplines have some researchers who are very strong in these areas, and, of course, other disciplines that are relatively weak on study design often know lots of useful things that most economists do not (item response theory, anyone?). The point is that disciplinary differences in the relative dispersion of knowledge about study design provide an incentive for weakly designed studies to find their published homes outside of economics. It would be a wonderful world indeed if journalists would adjust their reports for this important selection problem.

At the same time, I have some sympathy for the point of the paper. For many, but not all, subjects, lectures should play only a modest role in the teaching process. I think universities produce too many lectures and too few hands-on sessions in many cases. In econometrics, for example, there is simply no substitute for sitting down in front of the computer and confronting the data with the tools, and then writing up the results of the confrontation. Lectures have a role, but practice, made as realistic as possible, is a necessary complement.

Finally, McKenzie worries that economists do not have an outlet for such "exploratory" work. First, as a not irrelevant aside, Science is probably not a good outlet for exploratory work in any field. Second, I think economists do have ways to circulate or otherwise make use of exploratory work. One natural path is for a researcher to use it as a lever to get funding for confirmatory work that is better designed and has larger sample sizes. Another approach available to those with access to the standard working paper series such as the NBER and the IZA, is to circulate exploratory work in working paper form with no intention of eventual publication. There are also blogs, many of which function as a platform for the discussion of research at the working paper stage. Finally, one might have thought that a journal such as Economics Letters, or perhaps unrefereed conference volumes, would play this role.

Grade Worries

This is actually pretty uncommon at Michigan.

I did have an honors student at Western Ontario once ask me for more points a few days after I caught him plagiarizing. That was closest I ever came to screaming at an undergraduate.

Hat tip: Ken Troske

Academic bloggers

The NYT profiles some of the leading academic bloggers.

Of those listed, I read Mankiw and Instapundit reasonably regularly, Becker/Posner, Althouse and Volokh on occasion and crooked timber on rarer occasions. Back in the day, I took two of Becker's classes in graduate school and was, prior to Heckman's return from Yale in 1991, working on a dissertation under his supervision.

I was surprised by the absence of Marginal Revolution, which is the academic blog I read most faithfully. I am probably in some sense trying to emulate a combination of MR and Mankiw plus movie reviews though at this point I now longer worry overmuch about what the blog is or should be and just post what strikes me.

Addendum: Chris Blattman on academic blogging and, in particular, Dan Drezner.

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.

Really good writing advice

I like this column on academic writing a lot.

I think the most useful point is the first one, which I would reword to say that learning-by-doing is the way to learn to write. Reading is helpful too, and reading in particular with an eye toward the structure of the argument rather than just to the substance.

I would add three other bits:

11. Even if your paper is not as good as the last paper you read by Heckman (or the alternative famous and brilliant scholar of your choice) it can still be a really useful scientific contribution. There are plenty of great papers out there that never see the light of day because their authors compare them to the best one percent of papers and find them wanting. That is not the relevant standard. The relevant standard is: does this paper add to the existing body of knowledge?

12. I find that giving talks is really helpful in writing papers in the sense that I find it easier and more natural to develop the "story" aspect of papers in the context of a seminar presentation than when writing. Once I have the story, the writing is much easier.

13. Blogging is really good writing practice.

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.

What's your golden parachute (African dictator edition)?

An interesting tidbit from an article on the fighting in Ivory Coast to displace the recalcitrant predecessor to the democratically elected incoming president.

In the four months since the disputed election, the international community has repeatedly offered [defeated president] Gbagbo a golden parachute, only to be rebuffed. He twice refused to take a phone call from President Barack Obama, who offered him a teaching position at a Boston university if he agreed to peacefully step aside.

Several thoughts come to mind:

1) Is the Kennedy School developing a new MA program for dictators? Will it offer a "Masters in Dictatorial Administration"? I bet there would be a good market in this, and they could charge high fees (with a separately priced option, of course, for personal assistance with the master's thesis).

2) Maybe Gbagbo thought the teaching load was too high? Or perhaps they could not find a lecturing position for his spouse?

3) Is there some reason to think that a teaching position in "a Boston university" would be more attractive than, say, a villa in some central american country?

Worth taking a moment here, too, to be grateful for the social capital in the Western democracies that leads to the peaceful and regular political transitions we take for granted. It doesn't have to be that way.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

Not only Libyans hire out their dissertations

The NYT has some well-deserved fun with the plagiarizing, and now disgraced, German defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.

A tasty snippet:

Ms. Merkel [the German prime minister], a former academic married to a professor, was being accused of belittling intellectual property theft and, by implication, the value of an advanced degree, which is not a purely academic matter in this country. Many jobs require such degrees in Germany, where, as is not the case in America, calling oneself doctor for having completed a thesis in, say, political science or art history, is not embarrassing but normal, even when filling out Lufthansa’s online booking forms. (The airline generously provides three levels of academic achievement for its overachieving countrymen: doctor, professor and professor doctor, skipping the extremely rare but not unheard-of German mouthful Herr Professor Doctor Doctor).

At the same time, however, Mr. Guttenberg’s troubles thrust into embarrassing national relief the dirty secret that to gain such credentials, many Germans, well-connected ones anyway, apparently cut corners or worse, and universities often look the other way. The minister couldn’t admit to having farmed out his dissertation, because that’s literally a crime here, but he was generally suspected of having hired someone to write the work for him (how else to explain why he seemed so blithely oblivious to the contents of his own thesis?). And to add insult to injury, his advisers had even awarded him a rank of “summa cum laude” (“Summa cum fraude” was another of those protesters’ placards), notwithstanding that the thesis seems to have poached material from one of those very advisers.

Read the whole thing says Herr Prof. Schmidt, Ph.D.

Disclaimer: Jessica Goldberg did have something to do with this post.

Responses to negative academic book reviews

One possible response is to sue for libel in France.

Thankfully, the French court got this one right.

U of Miami

I gave a seminar at the University of Miami on Friday and had a delightful time. Thanks to everyone there for a very enjoyable visit, some good comments on my paper and useful discussions.

My seminar took place in the Bernie Kosar classroom, pictured above.

More on the American Sociological Association

Crooked Timber focuses on the ASA's lack of financial transparency.

Like CT I have always found it amusing that the economics job market is so much better institutionalized than those in sociology and political science. One possible explanation is just that economists have a better understanding of Coase's theory of the firm and so have a better sense of which activities should be inside institutions and which things should be outside institutions.

An alternative explanation is that, due to their higher value of time (the implication of higher salaries), economists may be less likely to spend time fighting over trivia, which may make organizing a market easier. An interesting study would examine the amount of time faculty in different disciplines spend in department meetings, conditional on department size and the age distribution of faculty. One would expect a negative relationship with average salaries.

A third explanation is that economists do a lot more hiring than sociology and political science, which means that it is easier to justify the fixed costs of both setting up and operating the job market institutions.