who said...

that graduate supervision does not pay direct rewards? Of course, there is the enormous pleasure (and occasional pain) of directing a thesis, batting ideas back and forth, seeing a young mind blossom... and the best then go off to great jobs somewhere, become co-authors, etc. For the most part, these are the benefits for the faculty doing PhD supervision. A senior colleague of mine once suggested we should levy a 10% on the earnings of our grad students, to align incentives (he also suggested econ faculty should be traded like football teams, with the whole outfit moving from one university to the next). What he is pointing out, of course, is that  - like so much else in academia - we do a lot of work with our PhD students, for no immediate material benefit at all. Typically, graduate teaching and supervision don't count for the teaching requirement; there is no extra pay, etc. A warm thank you? Some reflected glory? Sure. But anything more tangible - no. So you can imagine my surprise (and delight) when a former PhD student of mine decided to treat his old advisor to an upgrade to first class, no less, on my trip to the AEA meetings in San Diego... thank you! The email notification just popped up in my inbox yesterday. Totally unexpected, and very much appreciated. 

Lessons from the Dutch Republic

I have an op-ed which ran on the CNN website this weekend, comparing recent events in Catalonia with the Dutch fight for independence in the 16th century:

• • Catalonia's fight for independence: Are there lessons from the Dutch revolt?
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  • A small, wealthy region feels at odds with Spanish rule. Taxes are too high; political representation is limited; the elite feels unheard and ill-treated; unrest and popular opposition spread. Hardliners in Madrid advocate repression and have the ear of a new ruler. Turmoil ensues and escalates until a major confrontation is inevitable.
    http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/21/business/catalonia-dutch-revolt-lessons/index.html
    
    
    
    

Reading about punishment

fodder for our next reading group session (Hermann, Thöni, Gächtner, Science 2008):

We document the widespread existence of antisocial punishment, that is, the sanctioning of people who behave prosocially. Our evidence comes from public goods experiments that we conducted in 16 comparable participant pools around the world. However, there is a huge cross-societal variation. Some participant pools punished the high contributors as much as they punished the low contributors, whereas in others people only punished low contributors. In some participant pools, antisocial punishment was strong enough to remove the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment. We also show that weak norms of civic cooperation and the weakness of the rule of law in a country are significant predictors of antisocial punishment. Our results show that punishment opportunities are socially beneficial only if complemented by strong social norms of cooperation.

Greeks vs Germans

Guiso, Herrera and Morelli have a new version of their working paper on "A CULTURE BASED THEORY OF FISCAL UNION DESIRABILITY". They first show just how big cultural differences are between Germans and Greeks; they then move on to build a model of when a fiscal union can work. Interestingly, and contrary to what I expected, they find that diversity is actually good for a  the sustainability of a fiscal union.

Economic history pays

at least in the UC system... Keefe and Wang have a new paper on faculty salaries in economics departments of the UC system, and find that there is a 13-17% premium for economic history, after accounting for campus, seniority, gender, and publications. My guess is that economic history is a tougher field to get hired in (more of a "luxury" item); the scholars that do get in are way better than the marginal candidate in more mainstream fields. Eventually, quality shows and a good university system rewards them accordingly.

Amongst other interesting findings is how much higher pay at UCLA is than at Berkeley... the authors also have a hugely misspecified regression where they claim that they can back out the value of extra publications in different journals... after controlling for rank. This is a classic "controlling for an intermediate outcome" mistake, where an important outcome influenced by what you are interested in - publications - goes on the right hand side, and gives you completely the wrong results. For an interesting example, see the discussion by Andrew Gelman of "Engineers have more sons". 

Readings

Felipe Valencia and I are organizing a reading group in long-term persistence this term. Today, we'll be discussing "Poor Institutions, Rich Mines: Resource Curse and the Origins of the Sicilian Mafia" by Buonanno, Durante, Prarolo, and Vanin. Here is the abstract:

This study explains the emergence of the Sicilian mafi a in the XIX century as the
product of the interaction between natural resource abundance and weak institutions. We
advance the hypothesis that the ma a emerged after the collapse of the Bourbon Kingdom
in a context characterized by a severe lack of state property-right enforcement in response
to the rising demand for the protection of sulfur - Sicily's most valuable export commodity
- whose demand in the international markets was soaring at the time. We test this
hypothesis combining data on the early presence of the ma a and on the distribution of
sulfur reserves across Sicilian municipalities and nd evidence of a positive and signi cant
e ect of sulphur availability on ma a's di usion. These results remain unchanged when
including department xed-e ects and various geographical and historical controls, when
controlling for spatial correlation, and when comparing pairs of neighboring municipalities
with and without sulfur.

Fewer Guns...

More Violence. The NRA will love this piece of research! MIT's Laura Ralston has a paper that looks at a disarmament campaign in Uganda, and finds that there is more violence afterwards. Remarkably, it's not cross-border raids from Kenya that increased, but Ugandan-on-Ugandan violence:

This paper studies the effect of Uganda’s 2006 disarmament policy in the Karamoja region in East Africa, a traditional tribal area that is one of the most violent places in the world. This policy greatly reduced the guns of tribes in the Ugandan districts of the region but not in the Kenyan districts. Theoretically, the impact of the disarmament is ambiguous, since guns can be used for deterrence as well as helping aggressors carry out crimes, such as livestock raiding. For example, disarmament could reduce the advantage of heavily armed tribes over weakly armed tribes and lower the number of tribes willing to carry out raids. At the same time, it will also lower the expected cost of confrontations for all tribes, which may lead to more tribes initiating raids, particularly if the weakly armed tribes begin to raid. Empirically, I find that the disarmament campaign had the unintended effect of increasing the frequency of raids in Uganda by about 40%, while, consistent with the idea that disarmament reduced the costs of raiding, I find no impact on the monthly death rate. Moreover, this increase in raids in Uganda was driven by an increase in Ugandan initiated raids on other Ugandans, not an increase in Kenyan initiated raids on Ugandans, suggesting that in this context the deterrent effect of guns outweighs their impact as a tool of aggression.