Econlinks: The Freudian interlude

• Seinfeld's spongeworthy Elaine, an unusual, limited-purpose --but very thorough-- option theory application, by the one and only Avinash Dixit.
•  All passé now, but hopefully you did pick your favorite Cupid. 
• New academic econ world order... but only if you fail to control for the quality of the journals  those papers are published in (my conjecture is that if you take only the top 5-10 journals, the US-EU average gap actually widened). Unfortunately, most European academic economists still believe that publishing  frequently into journals (almost) nobody can remember the names of, or reads, actually makes any difference (other than locally). Pretty Freudian, if you ask me.
•  Compensating wage differentials for sexual harassment? Via: Tabarrok's politically incorrect MR example. 
•  Ely has a good analysis of an (the?) ubiquitous situation arising in the econ (not necessarily  junior) job market. Hamermesh's post on Freakonomics is more related to that than you'd first think. 
• Finding the G-spot; next will be tasting it. 
• Massive reorganization of science funding in Europe... Something promised every four years or so; at least in that practice they are consistent. I don't really know why they aim to change these things ever so often, seemingly just to leave their mark, instead of making sure something actually works well, for once . Very European, and very Freudian...
•  Looks a bit shaky research-wise, but let's take it at face value for now: heterogenous effects of the scent of a woman (I guess Colonel Frank Slade had a simpler, yet practical, view of life). In all cases, a related (albeit equally shaky...) study reaches what looks to me like the right conclusions, which even Slade aka Pacino could adhere to: "Our investigation, however, demonstrates that implicitly preventing people from attending to desirable relationship alternatives may undermine, rather than bolster, the strength of that person’s romantic relationship" HT: Freakonomics.
  
  
  

Econlinks

• Always wise thoughts from the one and only Kevin Murphy . If for some reason you haven't heard of him yet, all you need to know is that Murphy holds comparative advantage in all forms of production.

• A quite old, but still interesting and revealing article on Sergey Brin. I like this bit from Eric Schmidt: "Evil is whatever Sergey says is evil".

• Ambition-adjusted (Economics) journal ranking. Some (my) highlights: 1. No matter how you measure it, top 5 is top 5 and has been virtually the same over many years (and, caveat lector, it is certainly not a top 6... or more; in particular maybe somebody from the Finance group(s) at my former Tinbergen Institute reads this and eliminates the Journal of Finance from their current top "5+1": I think it is the only place in the world where they have recently altered the very top by adding this extra field journal, though they would be happy to confirm that their best papers are submitted always to one of the other top 5's...); 2. JEcGrowth, Review of Econ Dynamics and JEEA are the very strong newcomers and they continue to go up the rankings; 3. EJ is a champion of self-citations; 4. Some formerly very prestigious journals recently lost quite some ground, examples being JHumResources, Journal of Credit, Money and Banking, JDynControl etc.

• I concur: this would be by far the best way to organize poster sessions. Particularly if they are in Economics or Social Sciences in general...

• An interesting NewYorker article on Iran's trial-and-error Economics policies.

• Italy outsourcing peer-review to NIH: it could potentially be a solution also for other countries where finding decent referees for grant proposals etc. has been notoriously difficult (think Romania and the like). Via Liviu Giosan, on Ad Astra.

• Sardines (and Sardinistas). Try them grilled with garlic and parsley, indeed!

• The imp of the perverse (or How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion)

• "The secret to The Economist’s success is not its brilliance, or its hauteur, or its typeface. The writing in Time and Newsweek may be every bit as smart, as assured, as the writing in The Economist. But neither one feels like the only magazine you need to read. You may like the new Time and Newsweek. But you must—or at least, brilliant marketing has convinced you that you must—subscribe to The Economist. " More about the Economics of The Economist.

Sunday night econlinks

• Bilingualism and early child development: very interesting brand-new research in PNAS (institutional or individual subscription needed, else only abstract is free). And yes, bilingualism clearly pays off, if you were wondering.

• Vienna and the largest Swiss cities top Mercer's quality of living index for '09, while Munich appears to be the winner if you account simultaneously for both quality of living (position 7) and infrastructure (position 2). "München mag Dich" indeed, as they say.

• There are many problems with (some of) these suggestions concerning reforming the academe and pre-academe, but there should indeed be a continuous debate on these issues. Proposals 3,4 and 5 could be ok with me in the current format; the other three are presented in an unnecessary radical perspective, despite being debated many times before and shown not to be that simple as they seem at first sight. Via Gabi Istrate, on Ad Astra. An interesting corrolary here is the following: why not decentralize completely the process and leave it up to each university to organize itself as it fits it best (e.g. by offering tenure or not, by having "generalist" or "specialist" departments etc) ? In the long run the best academic/educational system would win (by attracting the best/most students, by generating the highest-earning/most succesful graduates etc.)? Of course, to some extent these differences exist even now, but more among "unusual" types of academic/research institutes and "typical" universities.

• Going Dutch -- the article would like to give an "American perspective", but ends somewhere midway and misses much of what I would have expected. Oh, and 18 months... come on! After 18 months you know yet nothing about Amsterdam, not to mention the whole of Netherlands (even after long discussions with Geert Mak) ... I'd love to read his opinions after 80 months... As for 'Socialism gone Wild', the author could try his chance a bit more to the North of Europe :-).

Econlinks for the weekend

• NYU Stern business school economists on the crisis, pinning down the real causes much to the same factors as Caballero did (1st bullet point). The book they advertise will certainly be widely read.

• Science child psychology article on disparities in children vocabulary explained by early gestures acquisition (differentiating based on SES family background). Goes a mile in the direction of Heckman's research project (see for instance here, 5th bullet point) on the importance of very early non-cognitive and cognitive abilities. See also an earlier comment of mine on another topic-related Science paper.

• Tyler Cowen's intriguing advice on what places one should necessarily visit in the USA. Well, I've already toured 3 of his 5 top choices... but I also think Chicago and Boston cannot miss a top 5... And if you want to stop in one of those cities for longer, you might consult the US city matchmaker I mentioned earlier (5th bullet point)...

• Perhaps some (good) advice for friends & relatives who are parents of toddlers (or older kids, for that matter): a) 5 ways to outsmart your 2/3/4-year olds and b) what to do when your kids provoke you (though a cost-benefit analysis is only vaguely implemented...). And meanwhile all you (Economics-inclined...) parents should be waiting for the "Parentonomics" book (to be released quite soon) that might provide well argumented economic analysis of all that.

• It is a very important research topic, granted (and, my hunch has always been and continues to be that 'deliberate practice' explains most of the observed high achievements), but my feeling is that findings & methodology therein are so far overrated (and over-mediatized) and that much more research is needed to get a satisfying, not to say definitive, answer... One ought to welcome however the distinction between plain hard work throughout (the 99% perspiration...) and high productivity hours (the nap after lunch?...).

• Don't judge US presidents (or for that matter, Greg Mankiw...) by the outcome ... Good luck convincing people of that... :-).

• Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy with more words of wisdom: there's no stimulus free lunch. Murphy continues from his ideas put forward here. I guess the debate is really or mainly about the multiplier size; the fact that Becker and Murphy insist so much that it is much lower than the advocated 1.5 should get other economists paying more attention (including some European economists I know who also believe the effect of the multiplier might well be that large...)

• Envy and schadenfreude, in the brain. Confirms intuition, right?

• "I think we economists love to speculate about heterodox theories when times are good and we feel free to discuss experimental alternatives to economic orthodoxy (and nobody is paying us much attention during good times anyway). But when the global economy is in free fall and everyone else seems ready to throw each and every Econ 101 principle out the window, we get desperate to save the core principles that lead to prosperity and development." Read more in Easterly's excellent piece on the economists' returning home.

• High time for the Lehman Sisters! They have all my support.

• The statistician on the origins of instrumental variables (read also his earlier account on the soon-to-be-out Angrist and Pischke book, which he appears to warmly recommend)

• Esther Duflo sometimes adventures in areas where she does not necessarily have a serious comparative advantange (see 3rd bullet point here for the area where one shouldn't start an argument with her...) I don't see how proper incentives (here disincentives...) can be given by imposing pay caps in the financial sector, what is, unfortunately, happening de facto now (at least if the respective financial institution receives governmental help). Philippon's point is well taken (and the co-authored research this is based on looks pretty sound), but he stops short from recommending any policy initiatives that would involve income ceilings, despite obtaining that financial guru's were paid too much. Au contraire, I think Posner and Becker ('at any level' is well worth bookmarking...) are the ones right in this context.

Econlinks for the weekend

• This erotic-stimuli-influencing-spending might be more serious than I thought (see my earlier short comment to Tyler Cowen's erotics of investing- 2nd bullet point). Although the researchers admit that all their conclusions rely on the men faced with a decision to be taken in a second or so... Yeah, then it could be very true :-). Some idea for smart business managers?...

• How to read a CV when the subject (considered for academic tenure) has about two top papers, but the second sort of refutes the first: interesting thoughts from Cowen on MR. Talking about that, here's somebody famous in that situation; Levitt likes her too (so better refute then remain silent...). And if you passed that tenure-track stage, here are some benefits of being a full professor. Not that in Economics anybody thinks it's a drama if you actually leave your department... or your profession altogether. Though, if you did stay for quite a while, you might want more incentives to publish high?...

• The new Dutch Me Judice partnering with VoxEu. Geen slecht idee, hoor!

• Investigating the root of biases and stereotypes (this is beyond scratching the surface and shifting all debate on political correctness: yes/no, as too often done nowadays). So far this is really not modelled thoroughly within Economics and much of this review of research within psychology is super interesting (though it is very mixed...). Here's an interesting quote, just to give you an idea what this is about: "To what degree are our decisions swayed by implicit social biases? How do those implicit biases interact with our more deliberate choices? A growing body of work indicates that implicit attitudes do, in fact, contaminate our behavior. Reflexive actions and snap judgments may be especially vulnerable to implicit associations." Link also to the 1st bullet point above.

• The new business gurus: I agree with Gardner and Hamel in top 5, but Thomas Friedman should be a very passing fad...

What I've been reading

Lately I've got about 5 books started at all times and I largely read them in parallel (unless I like one too much to let it out of my hands before I finish it). This seems to be an excellent strategy against getting "too much" of something in a short while and eventually deciding to drop it too soon (which, by the way, you should not shy away from doing anytime if you really--but really-- do not seem to find any merit in reading a particular book). Below some brief impressions on some of the books started by end '07-beginning '08 that I've finally finished:

• Stephen Greenblatt's "Will in the World. How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare". This is a book once suggested to me by my good old friend Daniel, probably the only person in the world who can read even two-three books a day :-). You'll learn more about Shakespeare (both life and creation -wise) than you've ever known before. Greenblatt, probably best known as father of the New Historicism, combines his comparative advantage as literary critic with a great biographer intuition and manages to almost deliver Will Shakespeare in person (I strongly doubt one can do better than this, based on the current, scant evidence on Shakespeare's life etc.). A book you should not miss.

• "Why beautiful people have more daughters [with too long of a subtitle...]" by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa. I once had a post related to research covered in this book, which was also when I decided that I had to read it. One good point is that you'll find out about a number of extremely interesting fertility or demographic empirical facts that you might have not known. For explaning most of these facts the authors try to fit an evolutionary psychology story. Unfortunately, there's also where you should be extra cautious: although they seem to be careful with presenting clearly the conclusions reached scientifically versus others that might be speculated upon, but cannot be given clear scientific backing, my opinion is that the book is still not satisfactory from that point of view. In fact I am very curious whether this is an opinion solely of people acquainted with scientific research/statistics/econometrics or it holds more generally. For those of you who'd like more details, some of the explanations in the book are simply taken over from several articles published in, e.g., the Journal of Theoretical Biology by one or the other of the two co-authors (Kanazawa most often), which have been already criticized on several grounds, see for instance the 'statistical' criticism by Andrew Gellman, published in the same journal. Somehow both the book and the previous articles on which the research therein is based, try to oversell, without always giving proper scientific foundations (though this does not mean the given explanations can be invalidated). This is not to say that you should ignore this book; once again, it can fill you up with facts you had no clue about (tip: facts that can be used in most colloquial discussions, since people seem to particularly like such topics: now you know which book to read if you want to get in the center of attention every time).
  

• Barack Obama's "The Audacity of Hope". Steven Levitt was the one who convinced me to read this book, as I've mentioned before (post in Romanian, with links to Kakutani's review of the book in NYTimes and to Levitt's admission that he "was blown away at how well written it is"). While I am far from being "blown away" after having read Obama's book, I agree that the book is well written, perhaps unexpectedly so for an active politician. One of its strong points is that pretty much all of the author's ideas are conveyed in parsimonious, common sense language; this is essential for a politician aiming to engage and completely clarify his position in front of a mass audience (with electoral power, where applicable). For those of you who want a shorter version, you can watch on YouTube the two parts (part 1, part 2) of Obama's 2004 Democratic National Convention Keynote Speech (the book extends and expands on the themes touched on in this address). This was the talk that essentially launched Obama as a key player in US politics. Whether you'd eventually like this fellow in the White House or not (hopefully that decision would not be solely based on the most appealing book written by the candidates), you will only gain from reading his book.

More to follow soon. Meanwhile, you can also check my "books" blog-category for other books I've read and/or talked about in previous posts.

How to (and how not to) praise (your) kids

I certainly agree with the conclusions of this interesting article in the New York Magazine (overviewing a few dozen recent studies on the topic): praising the effort rather than the intelligence or, even better formulated, praise needs to be specific. Could have certainly worked much better also in my case, though it wasn't my parents who didn't do their job properly :-). But the magnitudes observed even in very simple one-time experiments are simply unbelievable (plain counter-intuitive, from some point onwards). This clearly calls for more research and for seriously trying to formalize the findings by means of a model (again, we are faced with soft, descriptive social sciences, on the one hand vs. economics, on the other hand). And the NYMag author's self-impressions, in the end, even as a parent, are spoiling somewhat the spirit of the article so far. But it is still interesting.

The link is via Tyler Cowen on MR.

Bad research...

The problem with all this type of research is that they (the authors) do not have any model to account for their findings. I mean, interesting observations, but...nothing more. Not to mention that it does contradict other studies (also within psychology; every day there's a new descriptive study observing something else on two dozens observations and extrapolating to the whole population...). Not to mention that it does not take into account the subjects' own social status and other observables (forget about unobserved heterogeneity...). Not to mention that- and this is linked to the previous critique- this is in no way a 'ceteris paribus' conclusion. Not to mention that the sequential process here (first photos, then info on the persons) could influence the final choice- a lot. Etc. Probably this is why the authors are not (and cannot ever be) economists.

Note1: already from the title, the whole thing is counter-intuitive and I don't think extensive data supports the conclusion asserted here (ie. "women fall for Mr. Average", ceteris paribus, that is controlling for everything else, looks included)

Note2: it could be of course that the BBC distorted the message of the original article, could not find that.

MRIs and sex drive. And the science of love

Since I was just mentioning nudity and inspiration, let's go a step further and talk without inhibition about science and sex. This is very serious research. And it is one of the most read BMJ article of all times (if you want to be a scientist and desire popularity with the media as well, you might consider this field of research- well, you could also post personal nude photos on your website/weblog, though that might lead to somewhat of a negative attention...). The conclusion of this short study reads:

What started as artistic and scientific curiosity has now been realised. We have shown that magnetic resonance images of the female sexual response and the male and female genitals during coitus are feasible and beautiful; that the penis during intercourse in the "missionary position" has the shape of a boomerang and not of an S as drawn by Dickinson; and that, in contrast to the findings of Masters and Johnson, there was no evidence of an increase in the volume of the uterus during sexual arousal.

(Via Wired News.)

That being said, for the more prudish among you (sic!), but in for the scientific drive, here's something on the "science of love". It turns out that the sex drive is but a first stage (lust) of the whole process (I admit I usually stop there, big danger ahead...). So all you need to manage is proper quantities of testosterone and oestrogen. Full stop. But anyway, the next two stages are attraction (adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin at work) and attachment (oxytocin and vasopressin will do), respectively. These scientists have also devised the perfect recipe for falling in love (try applying that next week, on Valentine's ):

• Find a complete stranger.
• Reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour.
• Then, stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for four minutes. ( I realize why it didn't work for me in most cases: 2 minutes were already too boring...)

More details.