Tag Archives: econometrics

from Julie Nelson Yes, economics has a problem with women. In the news recently we’ve heard about the study of the Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) on-line forum. Student researcher Alice H. Wu found that posts about women were far more likely to contain words about their personal and physical issues (including “hot,” “lesbian,” “cute,” and “raped” ) than posts about men, which tended to focus more on academic and professional topics. As a woman who has been in the profession for over...

Wassily Leontief quote from "Theoretical Assumptions and Nonobserved Facts." Lars P. Syll’s BlogMainstream economics — like butter scraped over too much breadLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Causal Friday: In Which I’m Supposed to Believe That Kneeling Makes One Worse at Sport Ball…: This should keep data nerds occupied for the weekend…. :)

In case you haven’t heard, Google is the target of a class-action lawsuit based on gender discrimination. (Shocking, I know, given what we know about Silicon Valley more generally. =P) Part of the impetus for the lawsuit is an employee-led effort to collect compensation data that shows that men are paid more than women at the company, as described in the above article. From a data perspective, proving discrimination can be somewhat difficult- for example, we hear the often-quoted “women make...

Just why is anyone still going to these people for policy advice, let alone putting some of them in charge of setting policy? The power of elite discourse to persuade is dangerous when an elite controls the frame and there is no accountability for results. Lars P. Syll’s Blog Stiglitz and the full force of Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

On Fridays, we examine a research paper that uses (or fails to use) a clever method to perform causal inference, i.e. to tease out cause and effect. Economists Gregory J. Martin and Ali Yurukoglu have a new paper published in the American Economic Review (also available in working paper form here) that shows that the existence of Fox News has a (statistically) significant impact on Republican vote share. Here’s the abstract:We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for...

Personally, I won’t decide whether I am suspicious of the linear regression until someone tells me whether the slope is statistically significant. Also, if there are multiple explanatory variables that affect an outcome, a scatter plot that only looks at one of them at a time will generally looks like a mess even when all of the variables are individually important. In related news, this is a good opportunity to talk about the distinction between estimated effects (i.e. regression...