"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK
- Chris Lewis has a great article up at Campus Progress based on an interview with me about why we need to be thinking about demand-side rather than supply-side science policies. Given the brevity and the audience, it's necessarily a textbooky treatment of the economics of science - I obviously recognize there's more to be discussed - but I feel like even given the format it gets more in depth than most treatments of externalities in research.
- In the NBER working papers, there's some skepticism about strong labor supply effects of unemployment insurance from Farber and Valetta.
- Also in the NBER working papers, Morris Kleiner finds smaller wage effects of licensing than unionization. This seems natural to me, but apparently it's in contrast with other studies.
- My response gets cited in Bryan Caplan's list of the best answers to his what to do with a billion dollars post. He neglected my preferred response, though.
- Ryan Murphy successfully defended his dissertation! Congratulations! He has so far not tooted his own horn on his blog for me to link to, so I'll just link to his CV.
Do you plan on citing either of the two NBER working papers that you link to in the future, Daniel?
ReplyDeleteCongratulations to Dr. Ryan H. Murphy, indeed.
I saw your recent interview, and good work, Daniel. Though, I have one minor quibble about the points you offered to explain what you believed in the report...namely, aren't Points 2 and 3 essentially the same thing?
No, they're not the same thing. Imagine if you knew precisely what sort of benefits research would yield, but they yielded them in the far future such that a relatively myopic profit maximizer wouldn't care. That's point 2. Point 3 of course refers to uncertainty at any horizon (and in the case of R&D you don't need to assume a long term planning scenario to get a high degree of uncertainty).
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