Kathy Terrell, RIP

My colleague, neighbor and friend Kathy Terrell has passed on.

From the IZA email:

Katherine Terrell was a Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, and a Professor of Public Policy Analysis at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She published widely in the areas of economic development and labor economics. Her research evaluated the impact of government policies and the effect of globalization on wages, employment, income inequality and firm performance in emerging market economies. She also served as a consultant to various international organizations such as the World Bank, the OECD and the EBRD.

Those who knew her will always remember Kathy's warm personality and outstanding professional qualities. We are completely shocked by this horrible news. Our thoughts are with her family.

Indeed.

Addendum: Ford School tribute.

More on the TSA reaction

As usual, the economist says it best.

I particularly agree with this fellow:

I'll leave you with this, from Mr Schneier, responding to some of the new restrictions: "I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks." That would be nice.

Sigh.

Ann Arbor's Dumbest Robbers

All you need to know:

According to the police, the two victims were sitting in a car in the 400 block of South Forest Avenue, near the University of Michigan Central Campus, when the two suspects robbed them of an undisclosed amount of cash around 6 p.m. Sunday.

Officers were able to follow footprints in the snow to a residence, where the two suspects were arrested. They are charged with armed robbery and various firearms offenses.

They should probably also be charged with being too hopeless to survive without supervision.

Full article (which is not much longer than my excerpt) here.

Bad behavior from 3ie

This is from my holiday email from 3ie, an organization (that I am usually quite happy with) that promotes rigorous evaluation and evidence-based policy in the developing world. The figure in the graph embodies one of the tricks that Huff complains about in his classic book How to Lie with Statistics, which is shaving the vertical access so as to visually overstate the amount of change in the dependent variable.

Oops.

New show at the Security Theater

TSA reacts to Nigeria's Dumbest Terrorist with a bunch of unrelated and idiotic new rules because it positively must appear to be doing SOMETHING however inane.

Fun with Simpson's paradox

This WSJ pieces does a fine job of showing that sub-groups matter, especially, as in the kidney stone treatment example, when they are endogenous.

There is some implicit confusion here about education and unemployment. College graduates pretty much always have the lowest unemployment rate (they also have the highest opportunity cost of being unemployed). Does the fact that their rate is higher now than in the 1982 recession mean that the current recession is worse or that the now more numerous college graduates are a less selected, and so perhaps less able on average, group, and that both education and ability matter for the probability of unemployment?

Hat tip: my colleague Lones Smith

Movie: Sherlock Holmes

Great fun yesterday evening at Sherlock Holmes. I've never actually read any of the original stories (!) so I cannot vouch for the amount of veracity or the lack of it, but this was a fine Hollywood bit of fluff with lots of wonderful scenes of old London (including an action sequences on the still-under-construction Tower Bridge) to appeal to my Anglophile side.

Recommended as light entertainment.