Tips 4 Economists

Masayuki Kudamatsu has put together a gigantic list of bits of advice for economists. The best part: it's not just for graduate students and folks on the tenure track. It contains advice for people becoming department heads, editors of journals, and even deans! 

Are You Writing a Difs in Difs Paper Exploiting Policy Variation Across U.S. States?

It doesn't matter which policy you're evaluating or what outcome you're considering, referees and seminar participants will always be concerned that states adopting a new policy will by coincidence (or not so much by coincidence) adopt other policies at the same time that may be driving your results. Another possibility is that states adopt new polices in response to changing characteristics of the population---and these changes are driving the variation of your outcomes. It is impossible for researchers to control for all changes in policies and all demographic characteristics, but we can certainly assuage concerns by adding to our models controls for changes in other policies or demographic characteristics. And good news: thanks to the folks at IPPSR, you can find data on many of these things in one easy to use data set! Below is the suggested citation and you can click on the link for more information: 

Suggested Citation:

Jordan, Marty P. and Matt Grossmann. 2017. The Correlates of State Policy Project v.2.0. East Lansing, MI: Institute for Public Policy and Social Research (IPPSR). 

PS

Advanced undergrads and beginner graduate students looking for data and a paper topic for a term paper, I bet that perusing through the data may inspire many great ideas! 

And What About After Tenure?

Yes, this blog is written mostly for graduate students and young assistant professors. This is because I have more advice to give on those matters. But life (and work and goals and dreams) does not end when you get tenure, even if it's at a university you really like. There is still more work to do. The only difference is that people pay less attention to you. People aren't as concerned about protecting you from difficult service assignments. No more course releases. It's not that these things are not available, it's just that now you're responsible for getting them for yourself. And by now, you should be able to. That said, my firm belief is that we're never too old to get some good mentoring. 

This morning, Susan Dynarski tweeted about when associates should go up for full. Thank you for that! Associates, see the full thread here. Full professors, feel free to provide more advice in the comments below...or email/call/message/stop by my office/etc. to share your thoughts with me personally. 

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. ;)