Adventures in Madison

I was at the Institute for Research on Poverty Summer Research Workshop (which I co-organize) in Madison last week, which was the reason for the light blogging. As always, it was a lively and interesting time, with many old friends and some new ones as well.

Some notable bits from the conference:

I made my annual pilgrimage to Smokey's Club for a scandalously good (and likely scandalously unhealthy) meal of old-style relish (i.e. radishes and carrot sticks), cheese curds, salad, soup, 18 (!) ounce steak and hash browns. The dining experience itself is part of the attraction as Smokey's does not appear to have changed in any meaningful way since, say, 1963. Good fun.

The organizer / old people dinner was at Harvest. You can get steak there too (and I did, and it was really good, as was the chilled asparagus soup) but it is a very different dining experience. Harvest presents itself as upscale health food, with lots of organic bits, nods to localism, meat from cows that have been serenaded and massaged and all the rest of the things one associates with this genre of restaurant. I recommend it too.

At the other end of the gustatory scale, I learned about something called the "Super Donut" from a paper on school lunches (not yet on his web page) by Dave Ribar of UNC-Greensboro. The super donut occasioned much inquiry and mirth among the assembled academics. Further research upon my return led to this review and the surprising information that the Super Donut has ties to former Pittsburgh Steelers running back Franco Harris. Small world.

The Orpheum Theater on State Street in Madison, which I walked by each day on my way from the hotel to the conference, does not appear to be showing movies any more, but does have a restaurant in the lobby. My wife and I went to a movie there about six years ago, when I was thinking of taking a job at Madison. The theater is at least as gorgeous inside as the restored Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, but in less good repair and worse financial shape. The Orpheum's wikipedia page has some additional history.

Finally, I learned from a paper by (very clever) sociologist Dalton Conley of NYU that a non-trivial fraction of monozygodic ("identical") twins go through life believing themselves to be dizigodic ("fraternal") twins. The paper is not yet on his web page (though there is a related working paper) but I was struck simply by this interesting sort of measurement error, which has, presumably, strong consequences in some cases for how children are treated growing up.

IZA European Summer School in Labor Economics

European graduate students (including Europeans studying at universities in North America) should consider applying for the European Summer School in Labor Economics (ESSLE) that his held by the IZA each summer.

Each year's version of the summer school has two different faculty members; this year they are Shelley Lundberg and Jean-Marc Robin, both excellent economists. I taught at the summer school several years ago and the person I taught with, Chris Pissaridies, just won the Nobel prize! That class was also where I met frequent hat tip recipient (and very fine economist) Lars Skipper, impressive young Danish labor economist Marianne Simonsen and my new Michigan colleague Manuela Angelucci along with many other fine students. That is all by way of saying that (perhaps excepting me) the faculty and students are worth getting to know.

The IZA web page with more details is here.

Workshop in Denmark

I have just returned from about 10 days in Europe. The first portion was in Denmark to attend this workshop on the (surprise!) evaluation of active labor market policies sponsored by the Aarhus Business School.

Highlights included Michael Lechner's work, which Markus Froelich and Stephanie Behnke, on Swiss caseworkers, which you can find (along with the other papers) by clicking through to the program above. Caseworkers are, to use an analogy I am really tired of but have no good substitute for, the black box of active labor market policy. I am glad to see more people studying them as I think they are interesting in their own right and also because we might learn some things that would either increase program effectiveness or decrease program costs. Plus I find the general question of professional expertise of interest. Caseworkers certainly think they are adding value, but it is not so clear in the literature that they really are.

I also quite liked Monica Costa Dias' work, with Richard Blundell and Costas Meghir, on the accumulation of human capital over the life cycle via formal schooling and learning by doing. We had a good talk afterward the presentation about whether you want to incorporate learning by doing or on-the-job training in the model. These may sound like the same thing but learning by doing assumes that human capital increases whenever you work, while on-the-job training assumes that you accumulate human capital on the job, but only during a portion of the work day set aside for the purpose. In a life cycle context, the early human capital literature shows that if human capital depreciates at some modest rate, you gradually decrease your investment in on-the-job training as you age, because the period over which you reap the returns is getting shorter. In contrast, learning by doing assumes human capital just keeps increasing with work until you retire. These two models have very different implications for wages over the working life. I think on-the-job training probably predominates but the fact is that we do not really know empirically. This is a tough (due to difficulties of measurement) topic but one well worth more attention in the literature.

The most entertaining presentation was Bart Cockx' paper evaluating an active labor market policy in Belgium. Bart got a lot of laughs from the audience (which consisted entirely of Europeans other than yours truly and one Australian) just be describing the Belgian unemployment insurance system, which includes benefits that never end. Getting Europeans to laugh at your country's unemployment insurance system is a much higher level of attainment than getting Americans or other Anglosphere types to do so. Even more laughter ensued when the dramatic policy reform evaluated in the paper was described. Basically, the new policy sends claimants a letter warning them that they will have to meet with their caseworker eight months in the future. The paper itself is quite nice.

At the top of this post is a group picture from the workshop. We toured the Jylland, an old wooden battleship kept in drydock, with a museum to the side, just next to our hotel in exotic Ebeltoft. Being one who tries to provide public goods whenever possible, I am the one in the sailor hat, which our (amazingly excellent) tour guide insisted that one of us wear.

PolMeth XXV

Last Friday and Saturday I attened the 25th annual meeting of the Society for Political Methodology here in Ann Arbor. This is the analogue of the Econometric Society for political scientists, but without the theorists. Michigan is very strong in quantitative political science so I thought this would be a good chance to get to know some of my colleagues better and also to see what was going on in this literature. Political methodologists often read both the economics and the statistics literatures which gives them an advantage of sorts over most economists and most statisticians, who read only in their own discipline.

Some observations:

1. Political science is going through the same non-parametric revolution now that economics went through about 15 years ago which produces a sort of deja vu as assumptions are tossed overboard in a (hopeless?) quest for purely data driven inference.

2. Political methodologists drink more than labor economists.

3. Political methodologists interrupt in presentations, which makes the visiting economist feel at home. They can even get a bit testy at times.

4. Political methodologists also fret about who to cite for the potential outcomes framework.

5. Not many, but a few, political methodologists surf the internet on their laptops during presentations.

6. I have never been to a conference that set aside so much time for discussion. Basically there are four papers a day in 90 minutes slot with a long lunch and a reception and dinners and with much of the 90 minutes set aside for the discussant and for audience comments. The time is well used; I have not been to a conference where the discussions (including lunch and dinner) had as a high a substance / gossip ratio in a while.

7. The triumphalist panel that ended the conference and celebrated the growth of the society over the past 25 years reminded me a lot so similar triumphal speeches at the Society of Labor Economists meetings.

Movie: Dalai Lama Renaissance

Last night we saw the movie Dalai Lama Renaissance. It is a documentary about a conference held at the Dalai Lama's (DL) headquarters in Northern India in 1999. The aim was to bring together a variety of "thinkers" to interact with one another and then with the DL to solve the world's problems.

The movie was not quite what I expected. I imagined a lot of very earnest and very silly discussion of ideas that even a first year economics undergraduate could recognize were hopelessly misguided. Instead, the film is actually something of a study of the sociology of conferences. This made it interesting to me, having been to many conferences, including some that got hijacked by the participants because the organizers were not clear about what they wanted, which was the case with this one. Lisa, on the other hand, found it quite boring, and skipped the last third of it.

Also interesting was watching the DL and the interactions of others with the DL. Even among the various professors and others at the conference the demand for a leader who would remove the burden of thought and/or action seemed remarkably high. An equally or even more interesting movie would have featured a similar conference of people who simply thought the DL was a good and interesting fellow but who were not otherwise invested in eastern religion and/or in out of the mainstream political and social causes. For instance, it would have been very interesting to see the DL interact with real economists, instead of popular writer Vicki Robin, identified as a "progressive economist" in the film. Progressive she surely is, in the current odd usage of that word to mean people opposed to most sorts of progress; an economist she is not.

The DL comes across as someone very happy, who is having a great time and who wants to make things better. Remarkably, given all the adulation and attention, he seems not to take himself too seriously. In that, if nothing else, he is surely a role model.