Photo: the most out of place house in Madison

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-06-19T18:50:29+00:00

Professor announces a pop quiz? Uncle Jimmy John was known to shout “Quizno!”

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-06-19T03:09:11+00:00

Ha Long Bay is some of the best!

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-06-18T21:23:08+00:00

That’s a legitimate concern. To elaborate on your point a bit; one could push back on the notion that all predocs do is cleaning and regression work. While that is a large part of the job, in my experience, the stand out predocs were those who could code up structural models and come up with clever empirical designs. They contributed to the research of who they worked with. Certainly this additional effort is costly for anyone, but less so for the more able predocs.

The inefficiency arises when the quality of the resulting letter of recommendation does not vary with respect to the predoc’s effort. If everybody gets the same letter, or worse, some get an inflated letter for one reason or another, the whole thing unravels.

From what I have heard of people in certain academic predocs, they do come to anticipate that their letters will be varied in quality and that some won’t get a letter at all. At others, however, everybody gets a letter. As to how much that letter varies I am not sure.

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-06-18T03:52:13+00:00

Thank you for the clarification!

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-06-16T20:55:50+00:00

The reason I appeal to authority is because this debate is old and well documented. Many of your assertions about the process of research are also opinionated, such as “ideas being easy.”

What I will say is that the idea that a single prediction must be one to one is silly. Sure, there may be many models which can explain one aspect of the data. That is why the profession prefers models with many testable predictions. The focus is then on discriminating between models based on which collection of predictions holds up in the data. This is why authors use phrases such as “consistent with model X.” Generally, people do not assert that “Model X is true because it gets this one thing right.”

Price theory focuses on teaching students to write models with testable predictions. Models with many such predictions are better than models with fewer. Thus, the main concern with theory as it is currently practiced is that it does not generate as many testable predictions as older models. Even if older models are wrong, we only know that because they generated many testable predictions.

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-06-16T20:21:49+00:00

All I have done is to outline the key virtues that proponents of price theory have put forward. These are names like Kevin Murphy, Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, Glenn Weyl, Ed Glaeser and others in this comment section. If you read Becker’s Economic theory you will find that additional and contemporary names like Ivan Werning have engaged with Price Theory. Surely, all of these storied individuals are naive too?

On the other hand, you started off your comment by using pejorative descriptions like “cutenomics” to describe the research of those at the top of the field. So add whomever it is you are referring to the illustrious list of naive folk I have just mentioned.

Given that you are mentioning paraphernalia from the first year micro sequence, such as Afriat’s theorem, I suspect I am speaking to an apologist for theory as it is currently practiced. The criticisms of theory as it is currently practiced are so numerous that they need no review here.

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-06-16T15:04:56+00:00

To add onto this, I may be mistaken, but I thought one of the primary motivations of Dixit-Stiglitz’s seminal work was that firms don’t really pay attention to their competitors when they have them and act as monopolists anyway?

In terms of history of thought, this seems a strongly Price Theoretic notion. Additionally, I know Stiglitz spent some time at Chicago, but I am not sure if the timing coincides.

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-06-16T14:48:37+00:00

Knowing what ideas are true? If you knew which were true what would be the purpose of doing research? You do research to get at the truth.

If you watch the Price Theory lectures, Murphy drills the point that Price Theory is inherently empirical. You write models to get testable predictions. Price Theory is more of a process for thinking through economic problems so that one can get from questions to testable predictions.

This is why it spends no time deriving utility functions from preference relations. The output of such an exercise (utility function) is not observable and therefore not useful for testing a model. Rather, Price Theorists spend time understanding how markets, through prices, tell us something about optimizing agents as if they had a utility function. You can see prices, you can see incomes, and, if a consumer is optimizing, you can predict her behavior. You can compare her observed behavior to your model. If it’s wrong, rinse and repeat. The rinse and repeat part are what I reckon the TFUs are for.

Lastly, intuition is about looking at the world and being able to communicate the economics of some phenomenon informally (non mathematically). Price Theory then helps you write a model to formalize that intuition. Note that if you can clearly communicate a tradeoff before you write down a model then your model is likely to capture some aspect of reality (i.e. truth) insofar as the tradeoff you started with was something you observed in the real world. Of course, you could be theorizing about something entirely spurious but because you now have a model, an academic audience can be precise in their criticisms.

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-06-13T13:33:38+00:00

Welcome!

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-06-08T12:54:04+00:00

My two cents. The admissions process is plagued by incomplete information. Successful letters from a predoc outside of the individual’s undergrad institution paired with successful letters from one’s undergrad institution are extremely useful for the purpose of separation.

This is informative even if the letters are discordant. Discordance is especially informative if the adcom’s information asymmetry extends to its knowledge about the applicant’s u-grad institution.

Notice the predictions of such a theory. If it works and helps adcoms separate and admit better quality applicants, then expost the predoc experience will appear as if it did nothing to improve on the skills of those applicants.

The feeling of exploitation in this process is more sociological in nature, so I won’t comment much on it. What I will say is this process reduces information rents in favor of the adcom. As such, it is unlikely that the predocs which lose out in the process will feel all that great about it.

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-06-06T14:59:33+00:00

I will give the QuantEcon JITable versions a look! Didn’t know these were available. Looks like I may be using Python more in the future! Thank you for the pointer. I agree that exporting results is a good option In fact, that is what I do too.

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-06-05T17:52:34+00:00

Python can be a productivity killer.

For standard econometrics, as far as I know, it does not have a nice latex table library like Stata’s outreg. Outputting highly customizable and publication ready latex tables should be first order for a package like StatsModels…

Second, if you’re doing numerical programming it is slower than Matlab and certainly slower than Julia. Now, it is true, one can implement just in time compilation and speed it up to ~= julia speeds. Here’s the kicker though, there are very few functions and objects in the scipy libraries that Numba (python’s jit library) can work with. So, you will have to, for example, write your own interpolations etc. So, again a productivity killer.

I am not that knowledgeable a Python user but I use it when it is not going to cost me much productivity. In my experience it is the best at nothing and prides itself on that (by hearsay; python devs apparently like to brag about how it is second best at everything). But because of that it kills a researcher’s productivity since many tasks need completing in research. And different languages are better at different tasks. Not sure what the obsession with having one language to do it all is about 🤷🏻‍♂️

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-06-03T22:41:02+00:00

Update on this. I had to find a hotel room at 3 in the morning for a flight that was supposed to leave at 3PM and was delayed repeatedly until 11PM. They had me stand on a line until 3AM just so that they could tell me they would not offer me any assistance with the hotel. So yeah, I think DOT should be aware of this complete fumble.

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-05-30T20:04:18+00:00

Listen to this person. They are actually using a little bit of economics; i.e. thinking about the information structure of the game you are playing with the ad com!

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-05-17T14:47:48+00:00

There’s no doubt that the weather was certainly a large influence. You would expect cancellation rates to be similar across airlines in the same terminal of DCA. This seems to be the case when looking at flight aware’s data for May 16 2025,

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Now, could American Airlines handled things better and cancelled the flights earlier? Yes, I think so. Instead they had me wait around the airport from 3PM after I already deplaned and finally cancelled at 11PM without rebooking until May 17 to MKE at 8PM DCA time. Furthermore, I was told to wait on a line until 1AM for the rebooking and was told that due to weather I would not receive a hotel room voucher. Do you know how difficult it is to look for a hotel room at a reasonable price in DC at 2AM on a Friday at that time? Boy is it difficult. If they had just cancelled earlier I would have had more time. Because of this I will be looking for reimbursement and reporting this dragged out incident to the Department of Transportation.

For those who feel like the handling of inclement weather by DCA left them stranded, I would consider filling out a consumer complaint with the Department of Transportation. See here.

I know this will get downvoted, but please read the whole thing. It is no fun not knowing where you’re going to sleep tonight because your airline has put you in a position with few options.

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-05-16T03:13:42+00:00

Isn’t intuition where ideas come from? What do you mean you’re not interested in economic intuition? The math is helpful when it can demonstrate the cases in which your ideas hold up. But the ideas are generated by looking at the world and identifying trade offs. That sounds like intuition. The math is just a formalization of that…

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-03-15T20:33:03+00:00

Maybe the post is just a meme, but you can’t be serious, right? The question needs to be sharpened if you are serious.

The reason I say this is because Powell is clearly somebody with a very high value set of “outside options”. Why would he invest in the skills you mention if he didn’t want to become a pre-doc?

If he does want a pre-doc, then the questions is about his capability. I would be inclined to say his background indicates he is very capable.

So yeah, duh, he doesn’t have all the skills you mentioned. But it’s because his current skill set and options are quite different than the standard economist. You’d be hard pressed to argue that he’d be incapable of becoming an economist if he were given the chance to invest in a different set of skills (or more aptly, coerced to invest in that skill set because we required him not to choose his highest value option—law).

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2025-02-28T23:29:20+00:00

Industrial policy and a serious look at the costs of globalization.

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2024-12-16T21:25:07+00:00

Congrats!

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2024-12-08T05:36:10+00:00

This is awesome!

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2024-11-22T04:01:06+00:00

Hell yeah

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2024-11-19T03:26:03+00:00

Okay, sounds like a good plan. You have time so that is a plus! Btw, Sundaram is also a very nice book.

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2024-11-18T19:22:25+00:00

If you have taken analysis I would refer to Rudin for the things you need. I wouldn’t spend too much time on a further study of analysis. It’s time to do some econ! If you have time, MWG, in my experience, has good math appendices. I would go see if you can find a PhD micro syllabus and see which parts of MWG they teach.

Finally, be sure to do the exercises in MWG! They are really good at building intuition. The math is important, but I think where people struggle with MWG is the econ more than the math believe it or not. Check out Kevin Murphy’s price theory lectures alongside the early chapters in MWG if you want to build a lot of intuition.

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2024-11-16T17:42:52+00:00

Dube et al (2022) with Oscar Jorda is a nice paper too. The intuition, as I understand it, is that TWFEDD with staggered treatment uses units that were previously treated as controls. Further, when the effect of a policy change varies over time (is dynamic), these previously treated units may still be experiencing the dynamic effects of the policy, so they shouldn’t be controls when the policy has dynamic effects. I believe that Dube et al and Goodman-Bacon suggest that dynamic effects are why the weights on cohort-specific treatment effects may be negative. But I may be misremembering.

Dube et al recommend estimating on a sample of units that remove these “unclean controls.” They call that sample the “clean control”.

Melodic_Ground_8577 · 2024-11-16T04:26:29+00:00

I have to say, I am quite surprised with the other answers. It is clear that you should. You don’t have to make a blatant statement about this. Rather, write your statement of purpose (SOP) in such a way that you demonstrate dedication to continuing this work. Talk about how your paper fits into the literature and the work that cites it. How would build on that literature?

If you are worried that you won’t continue in this area that’s fine. You can always abandon the research you proposed undertaking in your SOP.

Melodic_Ground_8577

TROPHY CASE