So now you are going to do bourbon posts well as beer posts?

One correction needed. The Office of Management and Budget is not nonpartisan. While there are many excellent technical experts working there, OMB is the President's budget office and must follow the direction of the President. The budget office that is nonpartisan, and aggressively so, is the Congressional Budget Office.

Along with Musgrave, one of the most deserving economists not to have won the Nobel Prize.

Yep, telling students exactly what to expect will prepare them for real world analysis. Not!

To use a phrase from a slightly later post, "That is some weird shit."

If you don't have a free checking account with modest, if any, limitations on its use, it is because you haven't done much looking around.

How many of you have had articles substantially improved on the basis of referee comments? Not me.

Suspicions confirmed.

The package approximates a transfer of revenue from general fund to the transportation fund. It preserves the idea of user pays in the motor fuel tax but it also manages to damage the already-fragile finances of the state.

Thanks for a great review of the discussion.

Having this reviewer comment on quality of exposition is offensive.

I guess Arkansas - Little Rock isn't in the group of major research universities. I hadn't actually thought that it was, but this episode proves it. IRB's are a tail-covering operation at best. I passed my test on the principles for conduct, even though the questions had to do with drawing blood and experimenting with children, stuff hardly relevant for a public finance economist. But our IRB could proclaim yet another researcher fully up to date with the human subject standards.

It's too bad they didn't include law.

The budgeting fad du jour is "evidence based budgeting." Too bad Congress hasn't caught on and started paying attention to the evidence.

I use mostly published data and data from my reading of state laws. I could make a mistake in downloading, categorizing, and interpreting laws, etc. It seems to me that explaining exactly what my data sources are is far better than providing the data that I have stuck into a statistical program. Having someone replicate how I put the data series together gives a more robust test of my work than having them simply re-crunch a bunch of data.

If you check it out, his business activity tax is a value-added tax. Darn good stuff!

Another possibility: you have everyone mad because your proposal just plain sucks. I submit that as an explanation in this case.

It might also be useful to note that in 2013 around 66% of total lottery sales were retuned to players as prizes. So that increase in sales, regardless of how estimated, will not translate into that much revenue available for the state to spend on education or whatever.

NC education lottery began in 2006, I believe. That makes it tough for the consultant to get many more than 6 years of observation in cutting any regression.

It's called crowd sourcing. I've done it with my graduate classes several times with great results. If you really want action, offer extra credit to the first student who comes up with the answer and no credit beyond the first.

I saw the article and concluded that the guy gave horrible examples, almost like he was demonstrating what not to do. Did the editor read the article before deciding to publish it or did a deal get cut to publish the thing? Are you sure you want to assign it to your students? I thought I would do it when I saw the citation but rejected the idea after reading the article.

I had a discussant at Southern Economic Association meetings criticize my paper because it was written clearly and easy to understand and, hence, could not be considered serious economics.

Good luck. You are going to be spending your time trying to dig out from a barrage.

I suppose Senator Vitter would reject the use of contingent valuation for estimating the damage to Louisiana from the BP oil spill. BP would probably like that.

Why not turn the bib upside down and run as 999?