APPAM Fall Conference Submission Appeal

The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management's Fall research conference is now accepting proposals. It is the top academic conference for public policy, and the new president - Jane Waldfogel - is really sharp. It's in Albuquerque, New Mexico this year and I wanted to make a special appeal to readers potentially interested in submitting a panel. Kate's mom lives outside of Albuquerque and this would be a great two-birds-with-one-stone excuse to get out there so I really want to go.


I'll submit a proposal either way, but submissions of full panels always have a much higher likelihood of getting in. I'd like to submit my paper on a generalize maximum entropy version of propensity score matching. I think a general methodologically oriented panel would work great (really any kind of evaluation methods you have that you'd like to present), or any kind of applied work featuring propensity score matching so I could frame it as a propensity score panel. I am happy to do the grunt work of submitting the panel (I've done it before here successfully).


If anyone has any interest AND thinks you'll hoof it out to New Mexico, or if you're interested in submitting something else that you think I might be interested in working something up for, please let me know either in the comment section or by email.

Winter books

This winter I spent a fair amount of time reading and researching the mid-20th century, Mid-Atlantic constitutional thought as it relates to federalism, and these acquisitions (thanks to Amazon gift cards and cheap used books) reflect that work. It's something I just kind of keep pushing forward bit by bit. I think Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina offer a nice set of cases. The public papers of Terry Sanford are looking less useful than I had hoped, although he wrote a very insightful book in 1967 that I picked up earlier in the year about federalism and the dangers posed to the states. I have plenty of resources on the situation in Maryland at the time, so I've focused on the others here (and some general federalism sources). Where North Carolina and Maryland provide examples of what I'd call reform federalism or positive federalism at this time, Virginia is a more mixed case, with more stereotypical negative federalism associated with the Byrd machine.


From New Federalism to Devolution: Twenty-Five Years of Intergovernmental Reform
Timothy J. Conlan


The Dynamic Dominion: Realignment and the Rise of Two-Party Competition in Virginia, 1945-1980
Frank B. Atkinson


Messages, addresses, and public papers of Terry Sanford, Governor of North Carolina, 1961-1965
Terry Sanford


Federalism, Liberty and the Law (The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 18)
James M. Buchanan


The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s
Numan V. Bartley

If Google were a guy

CollegeHumor's Favorite Funny Videos

Sumner on "far-sighted" Keynesians

Here.

I find Sumner so baffling sometimes. A lot of his criticisms of non-market monetarists are based on strange diagnoses of their claims. Until this morning reading this post I would have thought it obvious that most Keynesians see Japan in the 90s and the Bernanke Fed as running into exactly the same problems. And yet Sumner's critique here is largely that Keynesians view them differently (and that's a problem). Sumner claims that in the 1930s they would have laughed at Friedman and Schwartz, but monetary tightening was a major part of the diagnosis of the Depression for Keynes. Where I think the real disagreement lies is in the claim that the Fed could have saved us. Keynesians then and now think that is a harder case to make - not that monetary policy is useless or impossible (another thing Keynesians don't claim but Sumner has a nasty habit of suggesting they do), but that it's a difficult tool to use in deep depressions. Once a monetary collapse happens, long-term expectations can be hard to dislodge (market monetarists tend to think they're easy to change, and therefore if they are not changed the monetary authority must be engaging in tight policy).

"Seven Nobel laureates endorse higher U.S. minimum wage"

Here.


Such headlines are always interesting discussion starters because they give the lie to things you might have heard about how anyone that understands basic economics thinks X. Even if you ultimately decide they are misunderstanding something, the reasons a Nobel laureate will take a different stance than you might are always going to be thoughtful.


If by "U.S. minimum wage" we mean federal minimum wage, I find it almost impossible these days to get enthusiastic about an increase. It doesn't keep me up at night worrying about it, but I really can't be super supportive of it. The empirical evidence clearly says that there are no real employment effects (or small positive effects if you find the methods of a certain set of studies persuasive, or small negative effects if you find the methods of another set persuasive). We are all entitled to prefer one method to another if we have our reasons, but the big picture is it's not a big effect.


You could argue that a nil effect argues in favor of increasing the minimum wage. I don't think that's entirely clear cut. There are other margin adjustments as well as long-term adjustments that we may be worried about. But even putting that aside, this is still going to be an average effect. Surely we think that a federal minimum wage imposed on a country of three hundred million people is going to be more binding in some areas than others. If you had a big positive effect maybe the average effect thing wouldn't bother you so much. But a nil effect means that the distribution of local effects is going to be both positive and negative.


And why wouldn't it be? You're saying that the price of low wage labor in Los Angeles, California should cost the same as in Oxford, Mississippi.


The nil effect in the empirical literature tells me there's something to the monopsony arguments. The data just don't make sense otherwise, and the theory is reasonable enough so I have no reason not to believe that. So if states want to raise their minimum wage, that's fine by me. There might be some free lunches to serve up, and it's their prerogative to go after them.


But I don't see why I should feel the same way about the federal minimum wage.

Veblen and Galbraith were the original anti-hipsters

For very interesting perspective on Ryan Murphy's life's work, read this.


He frames his anti-hipsterism as a criticism of status-signaling. To a certain extent I think this is fair, but what I've always found odd about Ryan's take on all this is that he seems to classify just about any social trend as status-signaling because it's trending, and that he doesn't seem to appreciate the fact that the whole reason these things "signal" anything is that there's an affiliated value that's genuine. Perhaps the line between the two is fuzzy sometimes. Localism is a good example. It's not a status-signaling thing to like to live in a community that's interesting, diverse, and close-knit. Those are things that would be valued regardless of what sort of status they signal. There are lots of ways to participate and build up such a community, and one of those ways is through the market: buying local. Now there are other facets of the localism tendency these days that are clearly just posturing as well. Ryan, I think, tends to jumble a lot of that together and scoff at any expression of localism as a value.


Veblen is perfect to mention as a version of Ryan from an earlier time, particularly the charge that anti-hipsters themselves share a lot of the hipsters' faults. It's hard to think of a more hipster economist than Veblen, after all, and yet as Ryan points out Veblen kicked off the whole anti-status-signaling thing. Marx isn't ironic enough. He isn't ironic at all in fact. Doug North seems grumpy where he should be blasé. Ken Boulding is in some sense, but he seems too peppy to be a hipster. I think Veblen wins this one.

Dale Mortensen has passed away

Here.


Very important work in labor market matching.

Bryan Caplan on household utility

Bryan has some interesting thoughts here. I have several detailed comments on it already. See if you have anything to add for him.

Links and updates

- Excellent material from Bryan Caplan on IVs. The cites aren't new or anything - I imagine he's dug them up for his book on education - but they are definitely ones I'm going to file away. As you probably know, my working assumption is that IVs are voodoo.


- Mark Thoma on labor shortages. Believe it or not, we don't have them right now! The data is interesting. It's a very broad question but I like that it's produced across industries.


- My history of economic thought and macro political economy professor, Robert Blecker, is quoted in this Economist article on NAFTA.




Some updates on me - nothing particularly special going on just start of the new semester. I'm taking Micro II, Labor II, and the doctoral dissertation seminar this spring. I plan on getting a draft of my second dissertation essay written up for my Labor II class. I've submitted a book chapter and fixed up and resubmitted an article on household production to a journal this winter (got rejected from the last one). I've got a book review of Living Economics to finish up this week. Most of my time this semester will be dedicated to preparing to propose, my contract work for the National Academy of Engineering on the engineering technician workforce (meetings in January and March), and the Sloan research. I also just learned a panel I submitted to the Eastern Economic Association conference in Boston on generalized maximum likelihood methods got accepted. It's just several AU students that I pulled together. The paper is written but needs to be cleaned up before the conference. I plan on submitting that to the fall APPAM conference too.


That's it.


That'll bring me up to my labor comp in June I'm sure.

I think a paper disucssing the relationship between the thinking of Beveridge, Hutt, Oi, and Kalecki on slack capacity would be really interesting...

As of right now I can only muster a modest discussion of the first two with passing references to the second two in this chapter for Guinevere Nell.

I wasn't even aware of Oi's work (a lot of it building on Hutt) until I did some googling after his death.