Lars P. Syll

Mandatory econ textbook supplement

RCTs — the danger of imposing a hierarchy of evidence The imposition of a hierarchy of evidence is both dangerous and unscientific. Dangerous because it automatically discards evidence that may need to be considered, evidence that might be critical. Evidence from an RCT gets counted even if when the population it covers is very different from the population where it is to be used, if it has only a handful of observations, if many subjects dropped out or...

Tora (26), Amanda (29), David (29), Sebastian (26), Linnea (20) and Hedda (5).

Vad vore väl en jul utan Karl Bertil? Otänkbar!  [embedded content]

SCB kommer inte längre lämna ut uppgifter om friskolor med hänvisning till att det kan skada företagens affärsverksamhet. Nationalekonomen och skolforskaren Jonas Vlachos reagerar starkt på beslutet. – Om centrala uppgifter om skolor anses strida mot lagstiftning om affärshemligheter måste man ställa sig frågan om det ens går att ha företag som skolhuvudmän, säger Jonas Vlachos. Efter en omprövning av sekretesslagstiftningen har SCB bestämt sig för att inte längre lämna ut...

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Låt mig få tända ett ljus [embedded content] Jag tänder ett ljus för dig också. Siv Pettersson (1955-1975). RIP.

 [embedded content] Great lecture by one of my favourite philosophers of science. Among other things, Nancy Cartwright underscores the problem many ‘randomistas’ end up with when underestimating heterogeneity and interaction is not only an external validity problem when trying to ‘export’ regression results to different times or different target populations. It is also often an internal problem to the millions of regression estimates that economists produce every year....

One of the most beautiful results of probability theory is Markov’s inequality (after the Russian mathematician Andrei Markov (1856-1922)): If X is a non-negative stochastic variable (X ≥ 0) with a finite expectation value E(X), then for every a > 0 P{X ≥ a} ≤ E(X)/a If the production of cars in a factory during a week is assumed to be a stochastic variable with an expectation value (mean) of 50 units, we can – based on nothing else but the inequality – conclude that the...

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