Research and Grants

It has been awhile since my last activity here; this semester was horrible and it is not over yet. I have a paper for a conference due Monday. That being said, something I really want to research is the corrupting effect of research grants. While I have minimal familiarity with grant funded research outside of economics, I would wager that the same corrupting influences hold sway.

In short, my hypothesis is that grants create perverse incentives for researchers in two ways. One is that it encourages researchers to conduct research that someone else wants regardless of how interesting, relevant, or socially beneficial it is. It creates an incredible bias toward doing research that someone is willing to fund which may or may not be something that is productive. Two is that often the funding source expects a certain answer and the researcher is then prone to twist the results in order to deliver the desired answer to the funding source.

More to come, hopefully. If this isn't a way to derail my academic future before it starts I don't know what will!

Grad School Lessons

I don't how many people have told me this. I don't know how many times I should have realized this before. Now I get it. The Number One Lesson of grad school is:

"It doesn't matter what you think!"

They hold the keys to getting you out of this four year hell storm. If they want it done, do it. If they don't want it done, don't do it. Get your union card, then you can do what you want. I FINALLY understand.

Solutions Not from Copenhagen

John Tierney, myself, and a few others are showing how green we are by NOT flying to Copenhagen to discuss global warming. Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario has a better solution. From Tierney's article:

"To end this political stalemate, Dr. McKitrick proposes calling each side’s bluff. He suggests imposing financial penalties on carbon emissions that would be set according to the temperature in the earth’s atmosphere. The penalties could start off small enough to be politically palatable to skeptical voters.

If the skeptics are right and the earth isn’t warming, then the penalties for burning carbon would stay small or maybe even disappear. But if the climate modelers and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are correct about the atmosphere heating up, then the penalties would quickly, and automatically, rise.

'Either way we get a sensible outcome,' Dr. McKitrick argues. 'The only people who lose will be those whose positions were disingenuous, such as opponents of greenhouse policy who claim to be skeptical while privately believing greenhouse warming is a crisis, or proponents of greenhouse gas emission cuts who neither understand nor believe the I.P.C.C. projections, but invoke them as a convenient argument on behalf of policies they want on other grounds even if global warming turns out to be untrue.'"

This way everyone puts their money where their mouth is.

My Return and Family Violence and Football

I know it has been a while since my last post. I've been incredibly busy with comprehensive exams, course work, teaching, and research. I've resolved to blog occasionally to further develop my writing ability. If anyone still comes by here, thanks for checking back in.

This study made me laugh this morning because it seems to confirm my intuition about people getting too worked up over sports. "Family Violence and Football: The Effect of Unexpected Emotional Cues on Violent Behavior." Here's the abstract:

Family violence is a pervasive and costly problem, yet there is no consensus on how to interpret the phenomenon of violence by one family member against another. Some analysts assume that violence has an instrumental role in intra-family incentives. Others argue that violent episodes represent a loss of control that the offender immediately regrets. In this paper we specify and test a behavioral model of the latter form. Our key hypothesis is that negative emotional cues – benchmarked relative to a rationally expected reference point – make a breakdown of control more likely. We test this hypothesis using data on police reports of family violence on Sundays during the professional football season. Controlling for location and time fixed effects, weather factors, the pre-game point spread, and the size of the local viewing audience, we find that upset losses by the home team (losses in games that the home team was predicted to win by more than 3 points) lead to an 8 percent increase in police reports of at-home male-on-female intimate partner violence. There is no corresponding effect on female-on-male violence. Consistent with the behavioral prediction that losses matter more than gains, upset victories by the home team have (at most) a small dampening effect on family violence. We also find that unexpected losses in highly salient or frustrating games have a 50% to 100% larger impact on rates of family violence. The evidence that payoff-irrelevant events affect the rate of family violence leads us to conclude that at least some fraction of family violence is better characterized as a breakdown of control than as rationally directed instrumental violence.

On Babies (Chinese) and Schools (Charter)

Two stories have recently caught my attention.

• Chinese officials are now urging some couples to have two children, primarily to ease the coming strain from the population aging. The One Child policy has created an incredible generational, and gender, imbalance. They'd better hope and pray a disproportionate number of these two child couples have girls.
• I have practically no hope that any education reform will work. The flaws go way too deep for vouchers, charter schools, merit pay, etc. to have any meaningful impact. The unionization of charter schools is one more reason I don't think school choice vouchers (or charter schools) would have any significant positive effect. Under a voucher plan, why wouldn't the current unions make every effort to unionize the teachers in voucher financed schools, thereby perpetuating the flaws of the current system? Even if school choice gathered momentum, the institutional structure of education remains intact. The financing mechanism might change, but the box within which (most) schooling occurs will still have its four walls in exactly the same place. For any significant and lasting change in education to occur, the walls must come down. I'm not betting on that happening.

Rooftop Agriculture

An interesting article on urban and rooftop agriculture.

Energy Use and Sin Taxes

Two great articles. Both are well worth reading in full, but a fantastic quote from each.

John Tierney on energy use:

"But among researchers who analyze environmental data, a lot has changed since the 1970s. With the benefit of their hindsight and improved equations, I’ll make a couple of predictions:

1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because...

2. The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run."

Robert Sirico on sin taxes:

"When it comes to public policy, the preferred method of discouraging sin should fall under the category of alternative, mediating institutions, notably family, church, and school. That would leave government officials more time to focus on the sins they can really do something about—their own."