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So now you are going to do bourbon posts well as beer posts?
Daily Demand and Supply: Who else ya' gonna call when you have a bourbon-related supply decrease paired with a negative environmental side-effect? We'll be waiting by the phone.
I'm not sure how I missed the original story, but I'm surprised John and I weren't the first call when this happened: Whiskey barrels were piled in a mountainous heap Wednesday after the rest of a whiskey storage warehouse collapsed in Kentucky, nearly two weeks after part of the decades-old st...
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.
This article at Vox summarizes everything that I've been trying to say at this blog for the past 10 years (and have been too apoplectic to say during the past year)
David Roberts: President Donald Trump’s administration has been on a deregulatory bender, particularly when it comes to environmental regulations. As of January, the New York Times counted 67 environmental rules on the chopping block under Trump. This is not one of Trump’s idiosyncrasies, thoug...
Along with Musgrave, one of the most deserving economists not to have won the Nobel Prize.
R.I.P. William Baumol
Here is an obituary: William Jack Baumol was born on February 26, 1922, and died on May 4, 2017. He was an American economist. He served as the professor of economics at New York University, Academic Director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and Professor Emeritus at P...
Yep, telling students exactly what to expect will prepare them for real world analysis. Not!
Should professors tell students exactly what they expect?
Imagine, for a moment, that students acquire valuable human capital during their time at university. Imagine that the grades on a student's transcript reflect his or her level of human capital. Imagine that, every term, a professor uses examinations, term papers, and other assignments, to measur...
To use a phrase from a slightly later post, "That is some weird shit."
Ooh, Ooh, Ooh! Can I be King? Pleeeeeaaaaase!?
Now things are really getting fun: In an extraordinary speech the EU Commission president said he would push for Ohio and Texas to split from the rest of America if the Republican president does not change his tune and become more supportive of the EU. The remarks are diplomatic dynamite at a...
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.
Jeb Hensarling's Alternative Facts
Adam Levitin: Jeb Hensarling's Alternative Facts: House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas 5th) has an alternative fact problem. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Hensarling alleged that "Since the CFPB’s advent, the number of banks offering free checking has drastically...
How many of you have had articles substantially improved on the basis of referee comments? Not me.
How to Write an Effective Referee Report and Improve the Scientific Review Process
From the Journal of Economic Perspectives: "How to Write an Effective Referee Report and Improve the Scientific Review Process," by Jonathan B. Berk, Campbell R. Harvey and David Hirshleifer [Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials]: The review process for academic journals in economics has...
Suspicions confirmed.
Graph of the Day: Trump vs Passports--Spurious or Informative Correlation?
The graph below was inspired by David Zetland's claim that... ...most Americans have neither visited foreign countries (compare passport holding with state voting here) nor follow news from those countries. Comparing passport holdings to state voting give us this possibly spurious and possibly...
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.
A revenue neutral carbon tax in ... New Jersey
Jared Walczak at the Tax Foundation: On November 1st, New Jersey residents will start paying considerably higher gas taxes, with the rate rising from 14.5 to 37.5 cents per gallon (cpg) as part of a broader tax deal negotiated between Governor Chris Christie (R) and Democratic leadership in the...
Thanks for a great review of the discussion.
Slides for: The Confidence Fairy in Historical Perspective
History of Economics Society :: June 17, 2016 :: Geneen Auditorium, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, NC: | ---- ##The Confidence Fairy in Historical Perspective## J. Bradford DeLong U.C. Berkeley, NBER, and WCEG Ju...
Having this reviewer comment on quality of exposition is offensive.
Burn!
From Referee #2: Unfortunately, I find the exposition of the paper rather to be substantially weaker than I would expect for an article of this type at any journal .... I found several aspects of the process for how the survey questions were assigned or presented to respondents, and how the ana...
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.
Lesson learned: don't conduct a sting of fake conferences and fake journals
No matter how tempting it might be: Jim Vander Putten suspected that some education conferences accepted any study pitched by someone willing to pay a registration fee. He worried that the gatherings enabled scholars to pad their publishing records while tainting research in the field. To test ...
It's too bad they didn't include law.
PhD Comics: Need more References?
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1823
The budgeting fad du jour is "evidence based budgeting." Too bad Congress hasn't caught on and started paying attention to the evidence.
'Collecting Taxes Is Government Work'
This was in links a day or two ago, but it's worth highlighting: Collecting Taxes Is Government Work, Editorial, NY Times: Buried in the Senate-passed version of the big highway bill is a provision that would require the Treasury secretary to use private debt collectors to collect unpaid back t...
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.
"Is withholding your data simply bad science, or should it fall under scientific misconduct?"
I say bad science and if you don't share data you should be outed as a jerk. Nicole Janz: I recently read a blog post by statistician Andrew Gelman, in which he commented on authors unwilling to share their data: “I’m not accusing [them] of scientific misconduct in not sharing their data.” I im...
If you check it out, his business activity tax is a value-added tax. Darn good stuff!
Blow Up the Tax Code and Start Over???
Here we go again with the flat tax proposals. This time it's Rand Paul: Blow Up the Tax Code and Start Over, by Rand Paul: Some of my fellow Republican candidates for the presidency have proposed plans to fix the tax system. These proposals are a step in the right direction, but the tax code ha...
Another possibility: you have everyone mad because your proposal just plain sucks. I submit that as an explanation in this case.
First rule of good policy: If you're pissing everyone off, you're probably onto something*
Gov. John Kasich’s tax package took body blows yesterday from the left and right of the economic philosophical spectrum. The conservative Tax Foundation, based in Washington, D.C., sharply criticized parts of the governor’s tax package, particularly the elimination of the state income tax for mo...
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.
This newspaper needs to take business and economic statistics II
Every Appstate business graduate could figure this one out: A consultant to the state lottery said in a recent report that spending on ads is “highly related” to sales. Recent figures in North Carolina don’t bear that out. For example, ad spending jumped by 17 percent from the 2009-10 fiscal ye...
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.
This newspaper needs to take business and economic statistics II
Every Appstate business graduate could figure this one out: A consultant to the state lottery said in a recent report that spending on ads is “highly related” to sales. Recent figures in North Carolina don’t bear that out. For example, ad spending jumped by 17 percent from the 2009-10 fiscal ye...
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've turned into THAT professor
Every PhD I know has stories from graduate school of THAT professor. The one who loses it, goes off the deep end and finally makes some decisions that are odd, weird, or just plain screwy. Stories of THAT professor are usually told over beers at a professional meeting and start with "Remember t...
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.
Show me the data, you had me at hello
Andrew Gelman: Stephen Jenkins wrote: I was thinking that you and your blog readers might be interested in “An Economist’s Guide to Visualizing Data” by Jonathan Schwabish, in the most recent Journal of Economic Perspectives (which is the American Economic Association’s main “outreach” journal...
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.
And I'm not joking around even a little bit
Andrew Gelman: An anonymous reviewer wrote: I appreciate informal writing styles as a means of increasing accessibility. However, the informality here seems to decrease accessibility – partly because of the assumed knowledge of the reader for concepts and terms, and also for its wandering styl...
Good luck. You are going to be spending your time trying to dig out from a barrage.
What I'm doing tonight
From the inbox: Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm Tuesday, Feb. 18, "Inequality for All", hosted by Belk Library, takes a closer look at the vicious cycle most middle class Americans are facing with the current economic status. "This movie is critically important. It exposes the hear...
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.
Crossing a line I've never crossed before
I've never chosen to write to a Senator, or Congressperson...until this morning. Here is my letter (highly paraphrasing John's letter--of course, my letter is wordier) to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. I have recently read Senator Vitter's letter to the National Park Service...
Why not turn the bib upside down and run as 999?
Runnin' with the Devil
Here's a story that combines three of John's favorite topics: Sports, Kentucky and an odd obsession with the mark of the beast: In one of the strangest cases of purported religious beliefs intersecting with athletic performance, a Kentucky junior cross country runner voluntarily walked away from...
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