The Ambrosini Critique

Back in the dark ages there was a debate about whether or not aspiring academics should blog pseudonymously before tenure. There was some speculation that Dan Drezner lost tenure at Chicago because of his blog and I remember, but can’t find, a good discussion at Crooked Timber on the subject.

Via email, a fellow grad student pointed me to Economics Job Market Rumors where Anonymous is having a discussion with herself about my fate as an “out” grad student blogger:

Blog is pretty opinionated. Is the guy as full of himself as he seems? Will the blog hurt him when he’s on the market?

help him. a) he doesn’t do personal attacks, but b) sticks his neck out there and says what he thinks. Gotta have some guts in this Econ academic-status game.

It won’t hurt him. Anyone who wouldn’t interview/hire someone because of that (well-written, intelligent, and respectful) blog is a buffoon, and he’d be better off elsewhere.

Revealed preferences exposes my favored hypothesis. It seems many “aspiring academics” forget they have a very nice outside option or two. In any case, let’s just say the experiment is still running and we won’t have preliminary results for at least several more months.

• Monetary policy and unemployment: welfare costs of lagged unemployment and optimal policy
• Time consistent fiscal policy: the case for an independent fiscal authority
• Banking crises cause monetary shocks: evidence from an IV
• Monetary shocks cause banking crises: evidence from an IV
• Macroneuroeconomics: detecting expectations shocks in real time
• Modern macro made simple: a new approach to teaching macro

(PS – My own dissertation would be on the list… except I’ve already read it!)

Somebody has the mistaken impression that people read CT for the posts. The comments are the only reason to “read”¹ CT.

The posters at CT deserve some credit for having attracted so many good commenters, I suppose. But there was probably some first mover advantage in this case, so not too much credit.

1. i.e. skim the post and head straight for the comment section [↩]

I’m waiting for them to realize where Prof. Delong found the citation for the monkey research.

Keep in mind that there’s huge fixed costs to simulations. I wrote code in May that is still running. As in, it hasn’t converged yet. This was suppose to be my job market paper.

This summer was spent trying to find ways to make my code run faster. There’s not much economics in that.

There’s not much economics in the algebra involved in getting analytical solutions to your models, either. But at least the end result is an equation that you can give an economic interpretation to.

Also, my sense is that these sorts of papers take a long time to get published. This is probably because the models are not very transparent. People giggle when I say that my paper will have “simulated comparative statics”.

Also, don’t use R to simulate stuff in. Its really slow and there’s not much you can do about it. Otherwise, R rocks.

I’m teaching finance this quarter. Thumbing through the textbook section on “anomalies” and behavior finance I see cites to lots of papers by these three guys.

These three are my guess for the Nobel. If I didn’t misread the “depression” contract on intrade (I didn’t catch that they summed annualized quarterly numbers to define a depression), I’d have money in that account to bet on these guys.

BTW, I can’t believe Barro hasn’t won.

UPDATE: Cheerleading for EMH. Cochrane’s introduction to Fama gives an argument for why these three folks deserve the prize.

The Real Scientist is breathing down my neck because we need to get out of town for something, but I have to get this out in the universe before I forget:

Talk to your advisors. All of them. They are, all of them, a huge asset. You have no idea which of your papers or ideas will be ready in time for the job market and you don’t know which of your advisors will be most open to your ideas.

Schedule a meeting with every one of them right now and meet with them regularly. Do it!

… this is a very good sentence: “I mean that the academic and esoteric economic theories that are studied in graduate university courses have a very real world and every day practical application.”

I bought the book. The comics are still funny the second time around. Here’s my favorite:

I want to know if this is true:

Under the Recourse Rule, an AA- or AAA-rated asset-backed security, such as a mortgage-backed bond, received a 20-percent risk weight, compared to a zero risk weight for cash and a 50-percent risk weight for an individual (unsecuritized) mortgage. This meant that commercial banks could issue mortgages—regardless of how sound the borrowers were—sell them to investment banks to be securitized, and buy them back as part of a mortgage-backed security, in the process freeing up 60 percent of the capital they would have had to hold against individual mortgages. Capital held by a bank is capital not lent out at interest; by reducing their capital holdings, banks could increase their profitability.

Is it true that this is what the rule change required and is it true that this is how banks responded? Also, is there a way to quantify the impact of this rule change (assuming this paragraph is a correct summary of what happened)?