- Interview with Erik Hurst. He discusses entrepreneurship “Most small businesses are plumbers and dry cleaners and local shopkeepers and house painters. These are great and important occupations, but empirically essentially none of them grow. They start small and stay small well into their life cycle…And when you ask them if they want to be big over time, they say no. That's not their ambition. This is important because a lot of our models assume businesses want to grow”
- Debraj Ray and Arthur Robson propose randomizing the order of co-authors, noting that “Debraj had just been enthusiastically recommended a “wonderful paper” by Banerjee et al, on which he was a co-author” and beyond blogging about it, even have written a theory paper on the idea.
- The Monkey Cage has a great set of Q&As with authors, special issue editors, a reviewer, and the journal editors of their experiences when the journal Comparative Political Studies published a pilot “results-free review” special issue in which authors submitted manuscripts without showing the results. I found this point from the reviewer useful “It is worth noting that we already do a lot of results-free reviewing. Anyone assessing grant proposals or sitting on a committee giving out fellowship money must take a stand on which research sounds more or less promising without knowing exactly what the results of the research will be. In advising students, we similarly must react to their initial ideas for dissertations or theses without knowing the results.”….but also found interesting that the journal’s editors were the most pessimistic of the lot about the process, discussing the costs of the process and noting that they are unlikely to repeat the results-free approach to reviewing and publishing.
- Time to throw out the HDI and other “mash-up indices”? Jones and Klenow have a nice paper in the AER showing how to aggregate consumption, life expectancy, leisure and inequality into an overall welfare metric – Western Europe looks much closer to the US on this metric than GDP, while East Asian tigers and developing countries look further away – and countries like South Africa and Botswana have welfare levels less than 5% of those in the U.S.
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