Eric Crampton • Jun 22, 2015 •
Scott Alexander warned we should beware the man of one study. There's a good reason for that: a lot of studies might not replicate. File drawer effects, p-hacking, honest errors and deliberate manipulation mean you ought to be somewhat sceptical of results from any one study.My Canterbury colleague Bob Reed, along with Maren Duvendack and Richard Palmer-Jones, make … Read More
Eric Crampton • Jan 12, 2015 •
Suppose I told you about something that's totally preventable and is associated with an average excess death rate of 6.7%. It's worse for youths: the excess death rate for those aged 20-29, because of this totally preventable problem, is 25.4%.And there would be one simple fix to end those excess deaths entirely.Ladies and Gentlemen, it's time to ban birthdays. The … Read More
Matt Nolan • Oct 09, 2013 •
Via Noah Smith. We have the following post on the Pinker vs Wieseltier debate on science and humanities (if you have a chance I would suggest reading the debates themselves as well). The era in which an essayist can get away with ex cathedra pronouncements on factual questions in social science is coming to an […] … Read More
Eric Crampton • Aug 14, 2013 •
More than a decade ago, back in the advanced econometrics course at George Mason, Thomas Stratmann taught us about the weak instruments problem. Looks like one of these was worse than I'd thought. Suppose you wanted to know whether education affected earnings. And you saw that people with more education had higher incomes. But suppose that you also thought that … Read More
James Zuccollo • May 12, 2013 •
We’ve all met hardened cynics in our professional lives. Those people who think the worst of those they meet at every turn because they’ve been burned so many times. They Continue Reading → … Read More
James Zuccollo • May 10, 2013 •
In the EJ: There is strong evidence that house prices and consumption are synchronised. There is, however, disagreement over the causes of this link. This study examines if there is Continue Reading → … Read More
Eric Crampton • Mar 15, 2013 •
The latest Stockwell piece on alcohol minimum pricing and alcohol-related fatalities seemed a bit fishy. I was mostly worried about how they ran a panel study that had zero cross-sectional variation in their main regressor of interest and where the main source of time series variation was CPI adjustments to measured prices, but it looked like there were … Read More
Eric Crampton • Mar 12, 2013 •
Unless you've run the regressions yourself, it's often hard to trust empirical results. A lot of results are fragile - small changes in specifications, either changing date ranges or adding seemingly irrelevant variables, can change results. And endogeneity always makes inference hard in social sciences. First best is running things yourself. If the data and code are available for … Read More
Matt Nolan • Jan 27, 2013 •
Via Economist’s View, I saw this paper by Case, Quigley, and Shiller (REPEC). Let me start with the positives, which are many: They are excellent writers, They get to the point – and have a clear idea of how important this sort of issue is for trying to understand cyclical phenomenon, They have pulled together [...] … Read More
Paul Walker • Sep 22, 2012 •
From Econ Journal Watch: Volume 9, Issue 3, September 2012. Ziliak and McCloskey’s Criticisms of Significance Tests: An Assessment by Thomas Mayer. The abstract reads: Stephen Ziliak and D. N. McCloskey have sharply criticized the prevailing use of... Read More