The positive nature of normative analysis
When you first take a grad level economics class, it occurs to you the discipline appears to be “social physics”. Where you thought the discipline was “a tool for understanding and social criticism and...
View ArticleThe computer thinks for us
Angus Deaton: Structural estimation is useful, not only for the estimates (whose credibility is often undercut by the panoply of supporting assumptions that are required to obtain them), but for...
View ArticleSubstitutability as default?
I’m jumping ahead of my own narrative, but why does it seem ingrained in people (including economists) that immigrants must be competing with native workers? Why is complementarity so much more...
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A little better
Here’s the cross-state plot of the effect of immigrants on native wages: This time you’ll notice that I plotted the changes in the proportion of immigrants against the change in wages (these are...
View ArticleEconomists: the King’s alchemists?
Delong: One of the embarrassing dirty little secrets of economics is that there is no such thing as economic theory properly so-called. There is simply no set of foundational bedrock principles on...
View ArticleSetting expectations
Evans and Honkapohja’s work on learning in macro is important. Watch this to get a sense for what they’re doing: But learning dynamics are not well understood empirically. Prof. Evans describes the...
View ArticleMacro Model Mart
John Taylor links to the Macro Model Data Base. You are no longer allowed to critique macro for ignoring your pet “obvious” mechanism without having checked this list of models.
View ArticleA link everyone will find useful
I was at a practice job talk at a nearby university on Friday. As preface to my work ((I’ll post on it as soon as I get my job applications sent)), I pointed out that workers change careers many times,...
View ArticleR: solving a small system of equations fast
My google-fu failed me on this one, so for the next person googling “stupid fast library for solving a system of equations in R such that the trade off between speed and ‘robustness’ is way on the...
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