“…being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is listening. I listen to them.”
- Mark Yudof, President of the University of California , N.Y. Times 24 Sept. 2009.
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Tags: Academics, UCSD, University of California
Justin Wolfers writes in the Freakonomics blog that economists should limit their objections during academic seminars to a list of comments to make discussions of research papers more efficient. Here are some of my favorite:
- Adam Smith said that.
- Unfortunately, there is an identification problem which is not dealt with adequately in the paper.
- The residuals are clearly non-normal, and the specification of the model is incorrect.
- Have you tried two-stage least squares?
- The conclusions change if you introduce uncertainty.
- I proved the main results in a paper published years ago.
- The market cannot, of course, deal satisfactorily with that externality.
- But what if transaction costs are not zero?
- What empirical finding would contradict your theory?
- What happens when you extend the analysis to the later (or earlier) period?
- That is alright in theory, but it doesn’t work out in practice.
- The problem cannot be dealt with by partial equilibrium methods; it requires a general equilibrium formulation.
- Is there a weak instruments problem?
- The conclusion rests on the assumption of fixed tastes, but (of course) tastes have surely changed.
- The trouble with the present situation is that the property rights have not been fully assigned.
- How did you handle endogeneity problem?
This list is likely only entertaining for academic economics. Wolfers wonders if the economics fields ability to characterize objections to research paper with such a list may suggest “…a methodological narrowness to neoclassical economics. But equally, it is the clarity of the framework that gives economic analysis its power.”
Tags: Academics, Economics, Economics - General, Seminars
A recent study found that the average professor is subsidized $10,554 at University of New Mexico’s Gallup campus. The “subsidy” is the average professor salary less the amount of revenue he/she generates from grants and teaching classes. The full article is available here.
Tags: Academics, Universities
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