The Manski Critique

Chuck Manski’s recent NBER working paper, “Policy Analysis with Incredible Certitude” (non-gated version) ought to be a must-read for anyone doing or interested in policy analysis.
The study is written in an accessible way, such that it can be in principle followed without explicit academic training in Economics/Econometrics (there are plenty of further references for the technical details), and essentially sums up some of Manski’s conclusions from his well known research agenda on empirical methods in social sciences such as partial identification, and using decision theory with credible assumptions, for policy inference– see for instance his books on these topics (which any applied econometrician should have on his/her shelf; though I confess, my copies are currently still in Aarhus, awaiting my shipping/bringing them to Chicago), Identification Problems in the Social Sciences (1995), Partial Identification of Probability Distributions (2003), Social Choice with Partial Knowledge of Treatment Response (2005), and Identification for Prediction and Decision (2007).
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NBER SI & ICA @ Boston

Mid July, terribly hot, Cambridge, serious Econ research: high time for the yearly NBER Summer Institute. Yesterday I attended an interesting second part of the EF&G Research Meeting, where in particular I’d single out Chetty’s paper on bounding labour supply elasticities with optimization frictions (succeded by Rogerson’s excellent discussion).
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Montreal, SED, and Pulp(o) Fiction

To start with the last item in the title, it wasn’t to be for The Netherlands… a third World Cup final wasted. Mais, c’est la vie. However, even though I predicted wrongly the winner in the very last game, I still managed to eventually rank 411th among 497,206 participants worldwide, in the Castrol’s FIFA World Cup Predictor Challenge.
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