Data Alert: Another Database on Immigration Policies

I haven't looked at this carefully enough to see how it differs from the other migration policy data set I blogged about, but I think they're both worth exploring. Let me copy-paste a description: 

The International Migration Policy And Law Analysis (IMPALA) Database is a cross-national, cross-institutional, cross-disciplinary project on comparative immigration policy.The database, which will be used for both qualitative and quantitative research across a range of disciplines, improves existing databases on policy and captures trends in immigration selection policy, naturalization policy, illegal immigration policy and bilateral agreements across 20 OECD countries, across time. It opens up possibilities for a range of comparative qualitative and quantitative research on the determinants of migration policy and the effect of migration policy on social, economic, demographic and political trends.

You can read more about it in this journal article. 

For Those of You Giving Job Talks These Days

Think, think, think about how to explain things as clearly as possible. Good luck and enjoy!

Watch This Before Making Tenure Decisions: The Curse of the Top 5

I started this blog for graduate students, but I'm hoping that by now some tenured professors who vote on tenure cases have a look every now and then. This one is for you guys.

Tenure or no tenure, what is one of our favorite topics of conversation? That new AER/QJE/JPE/etc. paper that shouldn't have been published there because it's not so good. Or that other paper (usually our own or our friend's) that for sure should've been published in a top 5 but was desk rejected in five minutes. Yes, this is all fun and good chatter at lunch--actually, I think it's great to be talking about papers period--but when it comes time for tenure decisions, this stuff is really, really important. These decisions have a huge impact on our colleagues' lives as well as the future of our departments. For this reason, I'm really happy to see important economists talking about these issues in a public way.

Have a look at this webcast of a panel discussion at the recent AEA meetings called, "Publishing and Promotion in Economics: The Curse of the Top Five." James Heckman, George Akerlof, Angus Deaton, Drew Fudenberg, and Lars Hansen talk about the problems arising when departments place too much emphasis on Top 5's when making tenure and hiring decisions. Many excellent points were brought up. I was especially impressed by the notion that different Top 5's are relatively more influential in different fields within economics. Some suggestions were made for improving things, but what I got out of the talk was mostly that this is a difficult problem. What is the alternative to relying on publications for making tenure decisions? Yes, we could theoretically read the papers, but even if we understood all of our colleagues' papers perfectly, it's very difficult to have a sense for the contribution of the paper in its subfield, especially given how specialized economics has become. Should we rely more on algorithms? Maybe, but we don't have much by way of data for new researchers. What to do? I don't know, but at the very least, we should be thinking about these things very carefully when making decisions.

Happy New Year (And Blog Anniversary)!

This is my new year wish for all of you (from Shit Academics Say):

May your words be plenty, your typos be few, your ideas accepted, and manuscripts too.