Demand elasticity pun

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Epistemological irritation of the day

The text for today's (very short) sermon is:

"A direct test of the hypothesis is looking for significance in the relationship between [one variable] and {another variable]."

No, no, no, no, no. Theory makes predictions about signs of coefficients, not about significance levels, which also depend on minor details such as the sample size and the amount of variation in the independent variable of interest present in the data.

Ugh.

Addendum: academic readers will know from the season that the text is taken from someone's job market paper.

A delightfully nasty political commercial

I'm a big fan of negative political advertising. This is an especially good one.

 

Hat tip to reason.

Evan Starr on non-competes

Recent UM doctorate Evan Starr, now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, makes it on to the local news in Champaign for a story about Jimmy John's having its workers sign non-compete agreements, which (more broadly) were the subject of his dissertation research.

Best parts (local news always delivers ...):

1. CSI-like closeup of Evan writing on a pad of paper with his mechanical pencil
2. The importance shown to interviews with random uninformed people at a strip mall