Frank and Ernest on the difficulty of insuring against aggregate shocks

Audi and Spock

The ending is perfect.

Hat tip: ASAK (I think)

A comic about fathers in honor of mother's day

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Seminary Co-op Grand Re-opening

The Seminary Co-op has its grand re-opening today in Hyde Park.

What seems to be missing from the new location is opportunities to hit your head, which were plentiful indeed in the old location in the basement of a seminary (hence the name). This was always a memorable part of the shopping experience for me.

Causal follies: The Atlantic on Citizen Schools

The Atlantic writes about a very PR-friendly program in which corporate employees teach after regular school hours in middle schools serving disadvantaged students.

Sounds great. Surely someone has evaluated it in some serious way, as the article indicates that it is expanding around the country. What does the Atlantic writer offer up on this score?

First, we learn that students in the program are self-selected:

Citizen Schools now serves about 5,000 middle school students each year across eight participating states, and the program documents lasting effects for its participants. Kids who have gone through Citizen Schools in middle school are less likely to be absent from high school, and graduate from high school at a rate 20 percent higher than their peers.

No causality there. Is there anything else? Well, there is this bit:

Michael Andrew says he knows participating in the program had a positive effect on him. When he was a fourth- and fifth-grader in Boston, he was one of the earliest enrollees. Now, he’s a 24-year-old graduate of Syracuse University who works at AllianceBernstein in information technology. And he’s back with Citizen Schools, this time as a volunteer.

That would be an anecdote, which is to say a participant evaluation with n = 1. The literature provides no real support for such participant evaluations.

Now, the sad fact of the matter, is that there is no way for the reader to be sure that there is not a serious evaluation out there that the Atlantic reporter missed (or did not know to look for) or whether this is really all the literature offers in the way of support for the program. Either way, a disappointment.

Sigh.

Assorted links

1. Happy birthday itunes. Somehow it seems like both more and less than a decade.

2. Library porn from the UM alumni association.

3. A bibliographic essay on Margaret Thatcher from the FT

4. An excellent post on the market for apples from Alex at MR

5. The Village Voice watches the Client List with a real sex worker.

Reinhart and Rogoff

My thoughts on the Reinhard and Rogoff coding error:

1. I liked the piece by Greg Mankiw.

2. I liked the piece by cyniconomics, which was linked to on MR.

3. I liked the piece by my colleagues  Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers 

4. Journalists and other economists need to have a reasonable prior here. The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking replication exercise, summarized in this (gated) American Economic Review article and now more than two decades old, probably provides the best evidence. The authors of the summary article conclude "our findings suggest that inadvertent errors in published empirical articles are a commonplace rather than a rare occurrence."  Some enterprising journal should repeat the exercise so that priors can be updated.

5. It seems to me professional courtesy that if you replicate someone's paper that has gotten a lot of media attention, and you find something that is likely to draw more media attention, you should send your findings to the authors first and give them a week or two to digest and respond before going to the media yourself. My understanding is that the UMass-Amherst folks did not do this. In my view, they should have.

6. My final (and quite serious) suggestion is that Dan Hamermesh write one of his famous, and very useful, advice papers on the topic of the professional etiquette of replication. Economists do not replicate as much as they should. Part of that is too-low rewards, but part of it is also, I think, that things may go sour in a very public way, as they have in several high profile replications in recent years. Perhaps a formal statement of norms of good behavior in this domain would clarify expectations all around and also encourage more social pressure on both the replicators and the replicated to behave in ways that enhances the scientific credibility of the discipline.

Thanks to Miles Kimball for some encouragement.