Lars P. Syll

Of what use are RCTs? In her interesting Pufendorf lectures Nancy Cartwright presents a theory of evidence and explains why randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are not at all the “gold standard” that it has lately often been portrayed as. As yours truly has repeatedly argued on this blog (e.g. here and here), RCTs usually do not provide evidence that their results are exportable to other target systems. The almost religious belief with which its advocates...

How to achieve exchangeability (student stuff) .[embedded content]

Pourquoi toutes les marques de luxe sont-elles françaises? .[embedded content] My favourite French teacher!

Economics — non-ideological and value-free? I’ll be dipped! I’ve subsequently stayed away from the minimum wage literature for a number of reasons. First, it cost me a lot of friends. People that I had known for many years, for instance, some of the ones I met at my first job at the University of Chicago, became very angry or disappointed. They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole. David Card...

David Card and the minimum wage myth Back in 1992, New Jersey raised the minimum wage by 18 per cent while its neighbour state, Pennsylvania, left its minimum wage unchanged. Unemployment in New Jersey should — according to mainstream economic theory’s competitive model — have increased relative to Pennsylvania. However, when ‘Nobel prize’ winning economist David Card and his colleague Alan Krueger gathered information on fast food restaurants in the two...

Does working from home work? .[embedded content] The frequency of WFH [working from home] has been rising rapidly … We report the results of the first randomized experiment on working from home, run in a 16,000- employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese firm … We found a highly significant 13% increase in employee performance from WFH, of which about 9% was from employees working more minutes of their shift period (fewer breaks and sick days) and about 4% from...

.[embedded content]

.[embedded content] Great presentation, but I do think Angrist ought to have also mentioned that although ‘ideally controlled experiments’ may tell us with certainty what causes what effects, this is so only when given the right ‘closures.’ Making appropriate extrapolations from — ideal, accidental, natural or quasi — experiments to different settings, populations or target systems, is not easy. “It works there” is no evidence for “it will work here.” The causal background...

Äntligen en budget i balans!

Poem of the atoms .[embedded content] O day, arise! The atoms are dancing. Thanks to Him the universe is dancing. The souls are dancing, overcome with ecstasy. I’ll whisper in your ear where their dance is taking them. All the atoms in the air and in the desert know well, they seem insane. Every single atom, happy or miserable, Becomes enamoured of the sun, of which nothing can be said. Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207-1273)