Here is the list  of courses I wish to teach next year at Chiang Mai School of Economics, not so sure about the demand there! Undergraduate (B.Econ.) ECON 304: Economics Statistics (with R) ECON 408: Research Design in Economics ECON 417: Managerial Economics ECON 419: Economic Theory and Entrepreneurship ECON 443: Industrial Economics ECON 4... [Read more...]

Economic geography of the eastern USA circa 1999, median incomes by zip code Code and data source to follow in a longer post. [Read more...]

Why trust some supposed laws of statistical sampling and convergence when you can just test them yourself? If you have a computer with R installed (also recommended: Rstudio) then you can stop dithering about whether these n=1000 studies cited in the n... [Read more...]

Introduction In the third installment of my series of criticisms of NHST, I focused on the notion that a p-value is nothing more than a one-dimensional representation of a two-dimensional space in which (1) the measured size of an effect and (2) the precision of this measurement have been combined in such ... [Read more...]

[Note to the Reader: This is a much rougher piece than the previous pieces because the argument is more complex. I ask that you please point out places where things are unclear and where claims are not rigorous.] In this fourth part of my series of criticisms of NHST, I’... [Read more...]

Introduction Continuing on with my series on the weaknesses of NHST, I’d like to focus on an issue that’s not specific to NHST, but rather one that’s relevant to all quantitative analysis: the destruction caused by an inappropriate reduction of dimensionality. In our case, we’ll be ... [Read more...]

Introduction This is my second post in a series describing the weaknesses of the NHST paradigm. In the first post, I argued that NHST is a dangerous tool for a community of researchers because p-values cannot be interpreted properly without perfect knowledge of the research practices of other scientists — knowledge ... [Read more...]

Introduction Over my years as a graduate student, I have built up a long list of complaints about the use of Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) in the empirical sciences. In the next few weeks, I’m planning to publish a series of blog posts, each of which will articulate ... [Read more...]

The subtitle is “Central banks, credit bubbles and the efficient market fallacy”. Executive summary This is much too important of a book to remain as obscure as it is.  Besides, it is quite a fun read. It talks about two subjects: Why markets for goods and services tend toward equilibrium ... [Read more...]

lembarrasduchoix asked: thank you for the introduction to Newcomb’s paradox! Could you do a post on your favorite paradoxes?    The decision theory paradoxes I’m familiar with are: Ellsberg Paradox— Theorists encode bothsituations with unknown... [Read more...]

A Greek Professor of Economics has written up a thought-provoking series of articles on complexity fetishism. As part of his …Continue reading » [Read more...]

Dave Backus points me to this review by anthropologist Mike McGovern of two books by economist Paul Collier on the politics of economic development in Africa. My first reaction was that this was interesting but non-statistical so I’d have to either post it on the sister blog or wait ... [Read more...]

Recently, I’ve been fitting some models from the behavioral economics literature to choice data. Most of these models amount to non-linear variants of logistic regression in which I want to infer the parameters of a utility function. Because several of these models aren’t widely used, I’ve had ... [Read more...]

I’ve written a few times before about how to choose the software you work with, and what you should and should not care about when making those choices. I maintain a page with various resources related to this, if you’re interested, most notably the Emacs Starter Kit for ... [Read more...]

The housing bubble by city. Miami sailed high and fell far. Detroit rose modestly and but dropped more than it went up. Dallas held steady. DC is enjoying a bit of renewed growth, but are in and New York yet to fall? [Read more...]

But modeling devices that make sense for an unbiased decisionmaker may not make sense for a biased one. For example, why would individuals have priors and posteriors if they are destined to apply Bayes’ law incorrectly?1 A question I often ask myself. Wolfgang Pesendorfer : Behavioral Economics Comes of Age: A ... [Read more...]

Every academic field seems to develop a set of generic insults based on their intellectual toolkit. Here are two examples I hear often: Probabilists and Statisticians: “I think that’s an interesting case, but it’s in a set with measure zero.” Economists: “X group’s behavior is clearly rent-seeking.” ... [Read more...]

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