« The Wisdom of Bailouts | Main | The Glass-Steagall Act: A History of Thought »
Econ Journal Watch
The new issue is here. The table of contents I list beneath the fold...
Table of Contents with links to articles (pdf)
- Crossfire Over Shall-Issue: Writing in the Stanford Law Review
in 2003, Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue found the balance pointing
toward "more guns, more crime." Making a number of upgrades, Carlisle
Moody and Thomas Marvell redo it and find the balance pointing the
other way.
(Professors Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue have been invited to reply to this article, and their analysis will appear in the January 2009 issue of the journal.) - Economists on Sports Subsidies: Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys call the rout.
- Colleagues, Where Is the Market Failure?: Daniel Klein dissects the judgment and rhetoric of economists on the FDA.
- The Curtailment of Critical Commentary: A report from Down Under.
- The State of Economics Science—82 Years Ago: A reprint from Social Forces, 1926.
- Endeavor in “We”: Daniel Klein invites a discussion about building an identity for [Placeholder] economics.
- Salute to Stiglitz on Iraq: Fred Foldvary reviews The Three Trillion Dollar War by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes.
- Where There’s Smoke: All funding is agenda-laden, says a correspondent.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 15, 2008 at 12:23 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
I'm printing out the Marvell and Moody piece now. Very interesting.
Posted by: jason voorhees at Sep 15, 2008 1:29:24 PM
Question to anyone reading this article. On page 278, Moody and Marvell write: "Our second novel variable is a lagged dependent variable, which is included to capture effects through time. An equation with a lagged dependent variable is a first-order difference equation, which can display patterns of growth, decline, or oscillation. The Ayres and Donohue model is completely static. It suffers from potentially serious omitted variable bias if the lagged dependent variable is significant."
I see no reference in the bibliography to Arrelano and Bond, though. If you use lagged dependent variables as regressors, you have some consistency problems, and Arrelano and Bond is supposed to fix that. Can someone more knowledgeable speak to this?
Posted by: jason voorhees at Sep 15, 2008 1:38:24 PM
(using lagged depvar with fixed effects creates the problem I meant to say).
Posted by: jason voorhees at Sep 15, 2008 1:43:19 PM
I am mystified by Dan Klein's bloviating 15-page article on "Smithian" economics. Is he basically saying that some economists are libertarians, or classical liberals? If so, what about the term "libertarian" is insufficient? What is the point of the article?
It reminds me of one of those campus op-eds you'd read as a college student where you kept waiting for the author to get to the point, and then you got to the end and realized maybe the whole piece was just obligatory space-filler.
Posted by: mk at Sep 15, 2008 1:44:26 PM
(satire)
I read the Marvell paper, and the conclusions were compelling. The only piece that matters, however, is the literature review table. It clearly shows that there is a consensus that guns at least have no effect, and probably reduce crime. Based on the precautionary principle, we therefore need to take all measures to increase concealed carry as soon as possible.
Ayers and that ilk are going against the consensus, and deserve to be mocked, have their academic credentials challenged, be denied funding, and lose their rights at the faculty club. These deniers are clearly in favor of more women getting raped - who let these misogynists publish anyway?
(end satire)
Posted by: at Sep 16, 2008 8:24:21 AM
