Assorted links

1. Nuriel Roubini, party animal.

2. A cool new job as "Chief Analytics Officer" for my friend and co-author Kermit Daniel.

3. Rebranding Popeyes.

4. How to tell if your dog is involved in a sex scandal.

5. NYC defines the frontier in public management.

Hat tip on #1 to Charlie Brown and on #4 and #5 to Dan Black.

Washington 31, Arizona 13

A great victory in truly miserable weather in Husky Stadium. And another piece on the defense.

Washington is 4-0 for the first time since 2001.

And for those in Ann Arbor who are missing Rich Rodriguez, you can hear his thoughts as well. He has calmed down a lot at this point from how he looked during the game, when the television coverage showed him screaming and cursing at his players.

Bonus 1: the story from last week's blowout of Idaho State, which I never got around to posting.

Bonus 2: Lane Kiffen fired as coach at USC. That's all good fun, but I worry that the first alternative USC will think of is Steve Sarkisian. I hope UW can keep him around.

Charlie Weis at Kansas

An interesting piece about former Notre Dame head coach Charlie Weis' challenges as head coach at the University of Kansas.

I did not realize that Jake Heaps, who was very heavily recruited by Washington back in the day, had left BYU.

Hat tip: Dan Black

1st Grade Soccer: Shooting Stars 10, Wolfpack 1

I attended my first ever sporting event involving my daughter yesterday. She and some of her compatriots from the Emerson School have a soccer team in a league run by the Ann Arbor parks and recreation department. Their team is called the Shooting Stars and they won big yesterday, in part because one of girls on her team is quite a strong player, being responsible for five of the 10 goals, including three in a two-minute stretch right after halftime.

The strong player was pulled from the game right after that scoring stretch and replaced with my daughter, I assume because the coach wanted to slow down the pace of the scoring. But, bless her heart, my daughter scored her first-ever goal about a minute later.

All in all, much more fun than I expected, with the added bonus that I got to chat with one of my colleagues after the game, as his son's team was playing in the next match on the same field.

New paper on the Workforce Investment Act

Does Federally-Funded Job Training Work? Nonexperimental Estimates of WIA Training Impacts Using Longitudinal Data on Workers and Firms

Fredrik Andersson
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

Harry J. Holzer
Georgetown University and American Institutes for Research

Julia I. Lane
American Institutes for Research, BETA University of Strasbourg,
CNRS University of Melbourne and IZA

David Rosenblum
Moody’s Analytics

Jeffrey Smith
University of Michigan, NBER and IZA

September 10, 2013

ABSTRACT
We study the job training provided under the US Workforce Investment Act (WIA) to adults and dislocated workers in two states. Our substantive contributions center on impacts estimated non-experimentally using administrative data. These impacts compare WIA participants who do and do not receive training. In addition to the usual impacts on earnings and employment, we link our state data to the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) data at the U.S. Census Bureau, which allows us to estimate impacts on the characteristics of the firms at which participants find employment. We find moderate positive impacts on employment, earnings and desirable firm characteristics for adults, but not for dislocated workers. Our primary methodological contribution consists of assessing the value of the additional conditioning information provided by the LEHD relative to the data available in state Unemployment Insurance (UI) earnings records. We find that value to be zero.

The paper is on my web page.

Cory Booker and the stripper

This is great stuff ... I especially like the spin:

Booker spokesman Kevin Giffis told the Daily Intelligencer, 'I think it's pretty well known that the mayor talks with people from all walks of life on Twitter'

My guess is that the effect of this "scandal" is to improve Booker's performance in the polls.

Economics Moment of Zen #10

"Surveys make the unobservable observable"

Charlie Brown