Losing....

I'm afraid that, in spite of Prof. Grier's epic "po-mouthing" that he is clearly winning, not losing, the citations race. Consider the two screen shots:

I would say there are two primary ways of judging impact in academic political economy: (1) number of contributions with >= 1,000 cites, and (2) h-index.

Prof. Grier has a 1,000 cite piece; I do not.  And the h-indexes are essentially tied.  AND the "since 2013" h-index is not even close. The difference between 21 and 18 is NOT "3," in any linear sense. He is running away with this, if you take the thing seriously.  I have little prospect of breaking 1,000 with anything any time soon. And he has several papers that were published in very visible places and will likely soon hit the post-2013 h-index.

(If you don't know what an h-index is....)

I guess that I'd go a different way, though. Two knuckleheads who shared an office in a basement 1983-4, who both failed their econ prelims (and deserved to) EACH now have an h-index over 30.  In some larger sense, an h-index over 30 is at least moderately bad-ass. Jim may not have been completely astonished at how Angus turned out, but I know Herb was surprised I ever got a job at all. So, here's to Angus and me, for surprising everyone by not being in jail!

Click This!

Clicker fraud at Dartmouth.

In the "Sports, Ethics, & Religion" class no less!

Students didn't go to class but their clickers did and other students multi-clicked.

People, I have a serious question:  If you cheat in a total joke class is it really wrong?

According to the Chronicle, "The popular class was initially designed to help the college’s athletes, many of whom struggled with freshman-year coursework."

64 of the 275 students enrolled are accused.

Dartmouth needs a "keep the jocks eligible class"? Really?

And it's in the Religion department?

Oh, my.

In the classes where I use classroom response systems, I've found it pretty easy to compare the number of people in the room with the number of people signed into the system. So far, that's been pretty fool-proof.

I am guessing this "absentee clicking" was tacitly condoned and the reason there is a problem is that some non-jocks wandered into the class and complained.

I guess this is why we can't have nice things.

I guess this now rockets Dartmouth past Cornell into the "least plausible member of the Ivy League".

Congrats.

No Wonder Mungo was such a great chair

Interesting piece at VOX describing research done on how the citation history of a department head is correlated with changes in the publishing performance of the department down the road.

Here's the money shot:

My boy KG Mungowitz sits at around 5400 cites on Google Scholar.  I think Duke owes him some royalties or something.

Here's what the article says about some common departmental decision rules:

It is not unusual for senior administrators to select chairs who have either undergone a decline in research productivity or made fewer research-specific investments over their careers (McDowell, Singell, and Stater 2009, 2011). Our study suggests that this may be a mistake.

Hat tip to Mark Thoma

Gimmie Shelter (in Place)

Such siren, much kevlar, so SWATTY, Wow!

On the heels of the Purdue shooting, we had a report of shots fired on the OU campus yesterday. Let me not bury the lede and say right up front that it was a false alarm.

But the campus was put on lockdown, or as we more gently say these days, we "sheltered in place".

We were in our conference room. Having a job seminar. We are right across the street from the alleged shooting site.

Did I mention that our conference room has a wall of windows?

The speaker was so dialed in and focussed that he didn't miss a beat (gave a fantastic talk).

This has happened at OU before. On the heels of the Blacksburg tragedy, we got reports of a person on campus with a rifle.

That time the rife turned out to be a yoga mat! (not making this up)

This time the shots fired most likely was just noise from the construction equipment operating right outside the buildings where the report came.

All ended well, even for us, as by the time the seminar was over, we had been cleared to leave our building and a group took our guest to lunch off campus with no incident.

People, recruiting is hard enough without SWAT teams dropping in during the campus visit!

Oklahoma is hiring in Time Series Econometrics!

It has been suggested to me that our ad in Job Openings for Economists is unclear, but we are hiring at the assistant level for Time Series!

Pay will be in the 6 figures (and is negotiable), teaching load is 2/2, start up funds, initial course load and summer support are negotiable, there is travel money available and we have a PhD. program and a funded seminar series.

If you are a time series person please consider applying! Operators are standing by.

Phil Schrodt on Retiring from PSU

Wow.  This is really something.  62?

Excerpt:

Unexpectedly, writing Seven Deadly Sins rendered me useless as a methodological  instructor. I am convinced that garbage can models are worthless, but in order to get tenure at any place worth getting tenure, you’ve got to publish garbage can models, and lots of garbage can models, and that is not going to change any time soon. In my former subdiscipline, the response to Achen’s 2002 critique of garbage can models was a journal-length methodological suicide note, Conflict Management and Peace Science Vol. 22, No.4. I’m not going to win that battle.

There is absolutely nothing worse than the stereotypical old fart in the cluttered office telling people “It’s all crap!!!”—while pulling down, year after year, a handsome if static salary—and I’m perilously close to that. In classical Chinese philosophy there is an oft-repeated motif of the sage who writes a book and then departs beyond the frontiers, never to be seen again. Perhaps 7DS is that [non-]book.

If Someone Asks If S/He Should Go Into Academic Econ....

Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics 

David Card & Stefano DellaVigna
NBER Working Paper, January 2013

Abstract: How has publishing in top economics journals changed since 1970? Using a data set that combines information on all articles published in the top-5 journals from 1970 to 2012 with their Google Scholar citations, we identify nine key trends. First, annual submissions to the top-5 journals nearly doubled from 1990 to 2012. Second, the total number of articles published in these journals actually declined from 400 per year in the late 1970s to 300 per year most recently. As a result, the acceptance rate has fallen from 15% to 6%, with potential implications for the career progression of young scholars. Third, one journal, the American Economic Review, now accounts for 40% of top-5 publications, up from 25% in the 1970s. Fourth, recently published papers are on average 3 times longer than they were in the 1970s, contributing to the relative shortage of journal space. Fifth, the number of authors per paper has increased from 1.3 in 1970 to 2.3 in 2012, partly offsetting the fall in the number of articles per year. Sixth, citations for top-5 publications are high: among papers published in the late 1990s, the median number of Google Scholar citations is 200. Seventh, the ranking of journals by citations has remained relatively stable, with the notable exception of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which climbed from fourth place to first place over the past three decades. Eighth, citation counts are significantly higher for longer papers and those written by more co-authors. Ninth, although the fraction of articles from different fields published in the top-5 has remained relatively stable, there are important cohort trends in the citations received by papers from different fields, with rising citations to more recent papers in Development and International, and declining citations to recent papers in Econometrics and Theory. 

Nod to Kevin Lewis

Visuals on Being an Academic

This is long, and takes forever to load, and it hangs.

BUT....it's genuinely hilarious.  With thanks to the Ward Boss.

Rootless Cosmopolitans

Nice article by N. Gregory in the NY Times about immigration and the economics profession. He uses his own department (Harvard) to show just how open academic economics is to foreign talent. But it's not just Harvard.

Take my own department in the middle of nowhere. I've already written about its cosmopolitan composition here.

This year, we are hiring an assistant professor. The three finalists are Canadian, Portuguese, and Korean.

The only real barrier to entry in the academic economic market is ability to speak English.

I once worked in a university in Mexico. The Econ department had professors from the US, Guatemala, Spain, & Peru.

The barrier there was the ability to speak Spanish (though when they first hired me, I really was a terrible Spanish speaker).

It's a mighty fine line

between professor and hobo, as this online quiz makes evident.

I only got half of them right.

Moneyball for Academic Hiring

The University of Oklahoma is kind of like the Oakland As. In the "major leagues" as a flagship state university, but not really in the the big time. A lot of schools or departments are in this situation and I've been on the faculty of many of them! So here are some Moneyball type strategies to find talent that's undervalued in the marketplace (our problem is not payroll, we can pay competitive starting salaries to junior faculty. It's more about getting highly talented people to come to Oklahoma):

1. Look outside the big name programs. Many schools or departments are fixated on narrow credentialism. But there are very good people working at lesser known schools and they occasionally produce very good students. Those students are automatically at a disadvantage in the overall market and their disadvantage is your opportunity.

2.  Consider couples. In the new world of academics, many job candidates have academic partners. Getting two good jobs in the same city is hard, so schools or departments with the financial flexibility and vision to make joint offers can gain an advantage.

3. Take a look at the "second student" or the "orphaned student".  Professors often have more than one student on the market. The top schools are often competing for the advisor's top student and often ignore the second student. But sometimes the second student is actually very good. "Orphaned" students are ones whose advisor changes jobs (or dies) before the student finishes. These students can get lost in the shuffle with no one making calls or strongly promoting them and sometimes these can be excellent candidates.

4. Sell your school or department to the candidate. Many of the people we've hired tell us, "you were the only group that actually read my paper and gave me useful feedback on it". Running a search is a big chore and a public good that frequently inspires free-riding. I always try to make sure that we can engage the prospective hire right away and show that we take their work seriously and that research is very important in our department. This is also an excellent way to uncover students who are not as good as they look on paper. If you move a job market candidate off their pre-packaged spiel and there's nothing there, that is a very bad sign.

5. Move quickly. The academic job market is a very uncertain and tense time for most candidates. Getting an offer out quickly means that a good candidate may have to decide between taking your financially competitive offer or rolling the dice to see if a better school does not hire any of its first choices and brings more people out in a second round of flyouts. Consider making offers early in the season and putting fairly tight clocks on them.

The edited volume blues

"Dr. Karen" has a few thoughts on the topic of "Should I do an edited collection". I reproduce it verbatim here as I have nothing to add to its towering awesomeness and truthfulness.

No.

Let me say it again: No.

 Let’s put it a different way:

 You: But, it’s just the papers from a conference panel. Is it ok then?

 Me: No.

 You: But, I’m co-editing it, so I don’t have to do all the work. Is it ok then?

 Me: No. And, please, co-editing? Are you kidding me?

 You: But all I have to do is collect and edit the papers and write an Intro. Is it ok then?

 Me: No. And you’re doing all this and don’t even have a chapter in it? Are you kidding me?

 You: But I’ll have a book for tenure. Me: No, you won’t. Edited collections don’t count.

 You: But it’ll get me a job.

 Me: You want to know what’ll get you a job? A REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLE IN THE TOP JOURNAL IN YOUR FIELD. Write that! Write two of them! Hell, you can write a whole effing monograph in the time you are going to waste fighting with your contributors, waiting for the external reviewers, arguing with your lame press, agonizing over the copy-editing, and trying to market the book because your lame press doesn’t spend a dime in advertising.

 You: Really?

 Me: Yes.

 You: An editor from a really great press I never heard of actually got in touch with me! And asked me to do it! Is it ok then?

 Me: No, and never, ever, ever accept an offer of publication from someone from a press you’ve never heard of. Or even a press you have heard of, if they come chasing after you. It’s the prom, sweetheart. Don’t go with the first person who asks you (unless they’re the dream date you’ve been waiting for). Do the work, and get yourself into position to get the date you really want.

 You: But I am already committed.

 Me: Get out of the commitment.

 You: But it’s my friends.

 Me: Have drinks with your friends. Go to Vegas with your friends. Do not waste your precious writing and research time gathering up and, god forbid, editing, your friends’ questionable essays and volunteering unpaid, uncredited time to get your friends a publication. And by the way, their chapter in your edited collection is barely going to do them any good either.

 You: But I’m going to go ahead and do this edited collection.

 Me: It’s your funeral.

Publishing as a Craft

My post the other day created some pushback.

A former student here at Duke sent this response, mostly in agreement with my claims (not that my claims were original, either, by the way!)

Hi Mike, I wanted to send a quick note to say I appreciated your post today about difficult letters of recommendation, and what it takes to succeed in academia. As someone who is basically a parishioner in the Church of Munger, all I can say is "amen." (Also, as you wrote a letter for me I am sure I am one of the people who gave you fits as someone with promise but nothing to show for it yet. I probably still am). 

Please feel free to post or distribute these comments as you fit. Let stress some other reasons why sending out a lot of work--especially early in your career--is important. Net present value is a compelling argument. But, assume that people only care about doing good work and not about future earnings or even getting tenure. Writing a lot may be even more important for reasons unrelated to salary and tenure. You don't grow as a scholar if you are not working (normal family vacations aside). 

Main points after the jump...

Lying, Cheating, and Introduction to Congress

So, people are surprised that Harvard students are cheating.  Really?  I'm not.

Harvard students don't always see an actual professor.  Harvard is a place where many of the world's best (perhaps the very best) students go to be taught by many of the world's angriest (perhaps the very angriest) graduate students.  Yes, the faculty are fantastic.  But the only place you will ever see some of them is on the faculty web page.

NOT surprisingly, then, given the atmosphere, cheating is rampant.  I suppose this should upset people, but it doesn't.  The undergrads are Harvard are so smart, so worldly, so bright and interesting that they can function as their own educational facility.  They don't always have faculty, but they don't need them.

There is one place, however, where cheating should clearly not upset people.  In fact, it ought to be required.  The course?  Introduction to Congress:  where cheating is part of the learning.  After all, if you don't cheat, you don't really understand government in action.  These kids are clearly destined for a success in politics.

Nod to Angry Alex

Nice Obit for Lin Ostrom

Best obit I have seen for Elinor Ostrom.

Thanks to Jonny Anomaly for the link.

Frampton Comes Unglued

As part of our continuing coverage of news of the arrest and incarceration of UNC physics Prof. Paul Frampton, we have some...well, some continuing coverage.

I have to admit they guy is growing on me.  We have talked about this before, and there may have been some incredulity in our electronic voices.  But as more facts come out, it turns out Dr. Frampton is pretty much like...most 65+ college profs.

(Read on, below the fold, for details)

Mo' Money

From LeBron's requests, "How do economics professors negotiate their salaries? Do econ professors share notes on this"?

On a year to year basis, there isn't much actual salary negotiation. The Dean will allocate a raise pool to the department along with instructions on how it is to be allocated. For example, there might be a 4% pool, 2% for across the board raises and 2% for merit (in recent years 0% raise pools have been common). Then the department chair or executive committee will review records and recommend an allocation of the money to professors which has to be approved by the Dean. Then every professor in the department goes to the chair and complains about their raise!

In the longer term, salaries are set by the market. Getting another offer can create competition and sometimes even bidding wars. Sometimes people make the move, other times they get a strong counter-offer and stay.

Econ professors talk about other professors' salaries a fair amount. When they talk about their own, I generally feel like they are, shall we say, less than completely honest.

If you work at a State school the information is public and every so often a newspaper might publish it.

Professors in departments that are hiring at the entry level often compare notes on what their departments are planning to offer new Ph.D.s and where the market for them might clear. New hires tend to negotiate more for 1 time expenses like start up money, moving costs, and temporary teaching reductions, and less on salary where schools often have less flexibility. Deans are seemingly more willing to agree to large-ish one time expenditures more than large recurring expenses like a substantially higher salary for new hires.

HIgher Ed blues

Here's the redoubtable Josh Barro on the costs of higher education:

Structurally, the higher education sector looks a lot like the health care sector. It hasn’t seen the productivity gains enjoyed by sectors like manufacturing and retail, which have benefited extensively from automation and technological advances. Colleges still need to employ a lot of highly skilled workers, and college costs are tied to their wages, which rise faster than inflation. It’s no surprise, then, that the higher education inflation trend looks a lot like the alarming one we see in health care. 


 But colleges and universities have failed to mitigate this phenomenon. For example, over the last few decades, the typical public four-year college has seen a sharp expansion of its support and managerial staff — from 5.5 per 100 students in 1987 to 7.5 per 100 in 2007. Colleges have also been reducing student-to-faculty ratios, and increasing spending on fringe offerings like gyms and student centers. As a result, expenditures per student by public institutions of higher education rose 48 percent from 1985 to 2009, after adjusting for inflation. Can we really say that higher education has gotten anywhere close to 48 percent better over that period?


While I agree with Josh that college administrators capture and waste a larger portion of the rents and that the withdrawal of state support dramatically increased the economic load of higher ed for non-wealthy families, I cannot come anywhere close to agreeing with the last couple sentences of the quoted portion.

Let's break it down:

First consider expenditure growth. People, 1985 - 2009 is 25 years. 48% growth over 25 years is, at a first approximation, something like a 2% annual growth rate. That just doesn't seem so bad a rate of spending increase. It's clearly below the rate of growth of real GDP. Is that really the same as the health care case?

Second, it's pretty much of a no-brainer that higher education is "anywhere close to 48% better" in 2009 than it was in 1985, though "better" is not easily made precise in this context:

Think of all the new majors. Think of all the innovative uses of technology. As Josh himself notes, dorms are way nicer, food is way way better, and athletic and leisure facilities are way way way better.

But maybe we shouldn't define "better" as "cooler" or "more enjoyable".

Well, how about if we define "better" as "more valuable"?

According to Goldin & Katz, the college graduate wage premium was around 40% in 1980 and rose to about 65% in 2005 (and was climbing at that point where their data stop). That's a lot more than 48% (62.5% to be exact).


Final point: A much higher percent of new high school grads attend college now than they did in 1985. The enrollment rate of new high school grads into college was 51% in 1975, and it rose to 70% in 2009.

I don't think that's because the product has gotten worse!

Tumblr o the day: grading season edition.

Students of America! Even the animals cry out against your wily ways.

Graduate Teaching Assistant or Grand Theft Auto

Hey, a pop song about a grad student! "When I write my Masters Thesis".

Very nice.