Thursday, January 9, 2014

New offensive coordinator for Michigan

Michigan has hired former U of Washington coordinator Doug Nussmeier.

As one of my colleagues (you can guess which one) quipped: "New offensive coordinator: one day. New dean for Letters, Sciences and Arts: 18 months and counting".

Addendum: I am informed that should be "Literature, Science and Arts". This is, of course, all part of my on-going strategy to avoid being chair.

1 comment:

Charlie Clarke said...

Jeff,

I'm happy to see you have a blog. I don't know if you are looking for post ideas, but here's a question that might warrant a post.

Bill Greene visited my school (UConn) last year. We asked him about, whether it was essential to have exclusion restrictions in a Heckman selection model. He said no, that the non-linearity alone is sufficient for identification. When he got some push back, he recounted an anecdote where he was one of three reviewers on a paper where this was the central issue, and ended up losing the argument to the other two. The quote he ended with that stands out is, "I am comfortable in the non-linear world."

The next semester we had one of your students visit (she was working in Corporate Finance at the World Bank). She had a Heckman model in her paper under robustness checks, and I asked her why she didn't just make it her main model and sidestep some of the endogeneity issues that arose in the talk. She said that, since it didn't have exclusion restrictions that it was bad form. She said that Heckman wouldn't like it and Heckman's students wouldn't like it (I guess that includes you, right?).

I guess what strikes me most is that people at the top of the profession disagree on this issue. It doesn't strike me as an open question, so much as different people knowing all about the trade-offs, coming to different conclusions (and maybe different conclusions about the right "rules of thumb").

So if you think I've summarized the views correctly, I think a post your position and why you and Greene disagree would be interesting.