Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

From the folks at phdcomics.com.

Why We Have Deadlines...

Two of my students are defending their dissertation proposals tomorrow. It seems kind of funny to be defending proposals in front of a committee of three plus two outside reviewers, but I'm very pleased at how much progress they've made while preparing for this. 

And now I need to find a good deadline for myself.

Summertime = Research Time

I thought now would be a good time to share some advice on publishing shared by Jessica Hoel after she participated in the 2017 CeMent Mentoring workshop. Ladies, you can apply for the workshop here. I participated in 2010 and have only good things to say. 

Regardless of your gender or stage of career, I think you can benefit from reading these pieces of advice on publishing. Thank you, Jessica, for sharing!  

Some of my favorites: 

1. Do not work on teaching during any sort of leave (summer, parental, sabbatical).
2. Be realistic about the kind of work you can do. Design a research agenda that fits your institution and your life.
3. Think BIG. You can do little things that show how clever you are. Or you can do things that matter. What will you do with the answer? Work on things for which the answer matters.
4. You can’t get published if you don’t submit. Mentors suspect that the biggest difference between successful and unsuccessful people is how often they submit and where.
5. Abstract, Intro, and Tables do need to be flawless. It will earn you the benefit of the doubt because you’ve signaled you are a careful researcher.

And now a challenge for you: Adapt the words to this favorite summertime song of mine for an academic's summer. 

Wishing all of you a productive and/or (but hopefully and) fun summer! 

Do You (or Someone You Know) Use a Shift-Share Instrument?

I know it's been a while, but I'm back! Grades submitted. Late referee report submitted. And I even submitted a new paper to a journal today. I'm ready to get back to blogging! 

What better way to celebrate my return than to discuss two new papers (Goldsmith-Pinkham et al. 2018 and Jaeger et al. 2018) on using shift-share (AKA Bartik, AKA Card 2001) instruments! I have read one of these rather carefully but haven't yet gotten to the other. In any case, David Mackenzie has come through once again by providing a nice intuitive explanation of both papers. Read the blog entry but also read Tim Bartik's very careful response to the blog entry and the two papers. Yes, the very same Bartik of the Bartik instrument. 

My remarks: If we were going to limit ourselves to only writing papers with absolutely no shred of concern about identification, I think we would all be running RCTs. That might be fun but it would substantially limit the number of important questions we could answer (albeit imperfectly). As Tim Bartik writes, the question is often not whether the IV is flawless but whether it is better than the OLS. 

All of that said, I absolutely agree and feel very strongly that authors have a responsibility to know the limitations of their work and to be very straightforward about those limitations. Goldsmith-Pinkham et al. 2018 and Jaeger et al. 2018 have each provided some important tools for evaluating our IV analyses. As a frequent user of these instruments, I say thank you. But please don't start rejecting my papers. ;)