How Not to be Reviewer #2

Here is an old blog post on how not to be Reviewer #2---ie, how not to be mean, unhelpful, vague, aggressive, did I already say mean? This Ashley Brown is pretty hilarious! I'd actually read the blog just for the super funny memes. 

Favorite piece of advice: make sure you're in the right frame of mind before you sit down to review. Maybe perhaps, don't sit down to write one of these just after you've gotten a journal rejection (especially if you received a terrible review). Or if you do need to write that review when you're in a terrible angry mood--because the deadline is approaching (or has come and gone)--be sure to write the review you would like to receive! 

Fun with Fixed Effects: Selection into Identification

It's funny how it happens. Last week I was talking with a coauthor about heterogeneous impacts and how this makes interpretation of results difficult even in perfectly identified models. And then this week, there's a brand new NBER paper discussing this very issue! Thank you, NBER (and Douglas L. Miller, Na’ama Shenhav, Michel Z. Grosz--the paper's authors) for delivering this careful analysis exactly when I was thinking about this stuff. 

Na'ama explains everything so nicely in this twitter thread. The basic idea: Imagine you have a family fixed effects model (same family, but some children exposed to a policy and others not exposed because of when they happened to be born). It's a nice natural experiment and would give you the right average treatment effect if everyone was affected by the policy in the same way and/or every family had some children exposed and others not exposed to the policy. The problem: the policy may not affect all families the same way, and we're only identifying the effect on the families who are treated. In the example in the paper, treated families are more likely to be big families and big families tend to be more strongly impacted by the policy (Head Start, in the example). 

So if this were just a paper describing some problem with the way things are typically done, it would be..well, depressing. But the great news: the authors suggest a reweighting technique to get us the average treatment effects! Hoooray! 

Thank you, Na'ama, for the twitter thread. So helpful.

How to Land a Publication in the Journal of the European Economic Association

Have a look at this Q&A interview with Juuso Välimäki, Managing Editor of JEEA from 2015-2018. My favorite part is his discussion of what makes a paper "general interest": 

A successful paper should have an impact on the way the profession views its subject matter. This is quite an easy task if the paper is the first written on a particular topic, and in this case the assessment is more on the generality and external validity of the findings. A paper on a well-explored topic should make us reconsider either the forces behind a result or the empirical support for the results. I should emphasize that overturning existing views is by no means the only way of achieving this. Finding corroborating evidence for existing hypothesis from new datasets and new empirical methods is also valuable.

Click on the link to see more. 

Yes, use those guidelines to decide whether to send your manuscript to JEEA, but I think the advice is even more helpful for deciding which papers to work on in the first place. ***With an important caveat: That you're working on something. Too often I see students struggling to come up with an amazing paper topic and don't start working on anything until they're about to hit some binding department deadline. My advice: write down ideas. Lots of ideas. Even bad ideas. Talk to people about those ideas and maybe they can help turn them into good ideas. Once you have a list of potential ideas, use the guidelines about what makes a successful paper to choose which to pursue. 

P.S.

I also really like the advice on how to write cover letters for journal submissions: 

JV: When submitting my own papers, I have used the cover letter: “Please consider the attached manuscript YYY for publication in XXX”. For most cases, this is sufficient. If there are special circumstances relating to the data sources or issues of conflict with other simultaneous pieces of work in circulation, these should be explained in the cover letter.

Cool Data Alert: Education and Criminal Justice Edition

I just learned of some really amazing-looking data publicly available for all to use. The Michigan Education Center has data on K-12 staffing, finance, and even test scores! The Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS) has data following individuals through the criminal justice system. 

PhD students looking for dissertation ideas, why not just browse through the data while you're procrastinating doing something else. Chances are, nothing will jump out at you right away, but maybe in a month or two (or three or four), you'll be at a seminar or reading a paper or going for a run, and that's when the idea will come.

How to Tweet/I'm Famous on Twitter this Week

I'll start with my excitement for the week: Econ twitter giant, Scott Cunningham, has a new job these job well these days (well, in addition to his usual one at Baylor). He is Associate Editor of Research Impact at the Journal of Human Resources. Basically, he promotes new and forthcoming JHR articles using twitter threads and interviews with authors. This week, he promoted my article (coauthored with Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes) on how binding caps on H-1B visas affect career paths of international students. I was nervous about the interview, but I will admit that it was really fun to be famous on twitter for a day! 

For those of you who are not on twitter but are interested in taking a peek, see this beginner's guide to #EconTwitter. Many good tips on getting started. My own piece of advice: #EconTwitter can be so useful, not only for getting career advice (it's where I get most of my inspiration for my blog) and learning about new papers but also for helping you feel part of a community. Careful though: if you spend your entire day everyday getting career advice vs. actually writing papers, you probably won't get so far. Maybe tread with caution but happy tweeting!   

P.S.

You can follow me if you like: @FurtadoDelia. 

Principal Component Analysis (and Your Great-Grandmother)

Confession: I use principal component analysis in my papers every now and then. I'm sure I read and thought about the math behind it the first time I used it, but recently, I rather mindlessly just type pca into Stata whenever I have many potential variables measuring the same thing, and I'm not sure which is best. 

So what exactly is Stata doing in the background to create that index of the different measures? Check out this excellent explanation. My favorite is the moving lines. What a great way to show what is going on! 

But what makes it such an excellent explanation? The different ways to explain the same thing! My challenge to all of you: Pick a tricky topic, any topic (examples: your job market paper, instrumental variables, lasso). Start by explaining it to your great-grandmother, then your grandmother, ...all the way down the line up until you need to explain it to an expert in the field. If you can explain it well to all of these people, you know it well. 

Hmm..I wonder if I should use this type of exercise as a problem set question one of these days.