Re: Economics and Image Making of Universities

2000-08-03 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
I think you should read Manski's "College Choice in America", perhaps the definitive study done on how people choose their colleges. Manski and Weiss show that most people try to attend cheap and local schools which means that most schools are non-competitive in admissions. I think he estimated

Re: SAT??? message dated Wed, 30 Aug 2000 15:30:02 -0400.

2000-08-31 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Unless I am really wrong, the SAT used to be an absolute score, with each wrong answer costing you 10 or 20 points, and 1600 being a perfect exam. -- Prof. Bryan Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] I think that Bryan is almost correct. Old SAT used to be a sort of

Xerox machines and book prices

2000-09-08 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
1) Has the invention of the xerox machine suppressed book prices by offering a cheap (illegal) substitute for new books? 2) If so, any empirical data? How much woul a book cost in a world with no easy copying? 3) Have tape decks, CD burners, etc suppressed music CD prices in a simialr fashion?

Re: Xerox machines and book prices

2000-09-08 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Good points, but let me point out that copying is a good substitute for short, expensive books such as many kinds of technical books. Maybe for most books, copies are a bad choice. I suppose that the bigger the book, the less useful it is. -f I'm not sure that copying is a cheap subsitute for

Re: Gore and Hollywood

2000-09-18 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Medved has previously argued in his 1992 book: "the typical "PG" film generates nearly three times the revenue of the typical R" bloodbath or shocker, then the industry's insistence on cranking out more than four times as many "R" titles must be seen as an irrational and irresponsible

The Economics of Chess conventions

2000-09-19 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Observation: Competitive chess players often use clocks to ration time. Seems logical - conserve your time for important or difficult move. Straight forward budget constraint. Question: Chess players often use the "touch rule" - you touch a piece, you move it. Is there any economic motivation

Marx vs. Hayek - let Amazon decide!!

2000-09-20 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Here some cute numbers Title Amazon.com sales Rank Approx Price The Communist Manifesto 3,955 $5 The Road to Serfdom 866$8 Wealth of Nations 1,782 $9 Essential Works of Lenin 40,222

Re: Teacher's income

2000-09-24 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
So, are professors really underpaid? (if such statement makes any sense at all). I recommend that you read chapter 5 of Stinchcombe's "Information and Organizations." That chapter is all about universities. One good observation (not unique to Stinchcombe) is that US universities seem to be

Re: Teacher's income

2000-09-26 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Once again, it goes back to supply and demand. People with good writing skills seem to be more numerous than those that can teach math. Thus, the price of writers should (and is) lower than mathematicians. -fabio Are Humanities less real skills that, let's say, maths or economics? If

The M.B.A. - why bother?

2000-10-02 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Business schools have been criticized for being pure credentialing agencies. The New York Time ran an article today about how consulting firms are hiring non-MBA's. usually people with graduate degrees in any field. In house studies show that MBA do just as well as non-MBAs. The article is:

This year econ nobel prize?

2000-10-11 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Any guesses on the econ nobel prize this year? -fabio

Murray/Hernstein

2000-10-26 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Chris, could you summarize the alleged deficiencies of the Bell Curve? -fabio On Thu, 26 Oct 2000, Chris Auld wrote: journal, for very good reasons. I'd put the Bell Curve in the bottom 5% of the distribution of published empirical work in economics. And I'm probably being far too

The Price of Free Speech ce of Free

2000-12-04 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Observation: Many colleges in the pre-civil war era attracted donations from abolitionists because they offered a place where abolitionists could argue their case freely. In other words, many colleges were paid forums for the abolitionist movement. Question: Could we use charitable donations to

The ACLU and The Price of Free Speech

2000-12-04 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, Robin Hanson wrote: But I have often wondered if we could measure willingness to pay for various freedoms, perhaps by just directly asking people. I think we already have one good measure: the amount of donations to organizations dedicated to free speech such as the ACLU.

Re: The ACLU and The Price of Free Speech

2000-12-05 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
On Tue, 5 Dec 2000, Yann Le Du wrote: Doesn't the _existence_ of the rule participate in changing the way the people "think the chances are that the government would actually try to stop them" ? I think there's a retroaction process there. You might think so, but for the longest time in

Pocket Change

2000-12-14 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
A friend of mine noticed that men tend to carry rather large amounts of change in their pockets compare to women. Any economic explanation of why this is? -fabio

The Medieval Postal Service

2001-01-09 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Last summer, I argued with a friend over the privatization of the postal service. He said that the postal service already did a good job as one could ask for. A bystander opined that without market forces, how could one really know if a job was done efficiently or not? With the postal service,

Re: The Medieval Postal Service

2001-01-09 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Good point, Alex. I think I like the medieval example because it's a little more shocking - the US Post does about the same job as private postal carriers in the Dark Ages. -fabio You don't have to go back that far. The Pony Express had speeds comparable to today's US Post Office on

Re: The Medieval Postal Service

2001-01-11 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
I was reading Braudel's text and he said that for each leg of a journey (12-18 miles) the courier would charge 1 ducat. Thus trans mediterranean letters could cost an entire year's pay. -fabio

Airline firms

2001-01-16 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Why do airline firms exist? Seriously, given the unpredictable nature of the airline industry such as disasters, bad weather, labor strikes and regulation you would think almost no one could survive in such a wacky business environment. I know that some firms tend to make profits (like

Re: California Power Crisis/Mises Cycle

2001-01-18 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Alex, Here is a follow up question: why did California state regulators forbid or discourage all the practices (extra plants, buying futures,etc) that would help stabilize the power supply? Fabio

Keynes in China

2001-02-04 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
A new graduate student in my department told me that at Beijing University, econ undergraduates are not taught Keynesian economics - they get a good dose of Marxism and then they get hooked up with monetarism!! Can anybody else verify this? Is China liberalized enough so that students are

Re: Growth, Wealth, and Race

2001-02-15 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Question: What would controlling for racial composition do to these results? Clearly there is high collinearity between race and latitude, though modern transportation is weakening the connection. If you do both latitude and racial composition, what would happen? Does anyone have hard

Re: Economics Ph.D. ...WSJ article

2001-02-20 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
I should also note that this has happened in computer science dpeartments as well, for almost identical reasons. -fabio

Re: Excessive drinking

2001-09-12 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
1. any takers on why? How about learning? Younger people, by definition have less experience/ knowledge. they probably have less emotional control than older people. 2. is a forbidden fruit argument consistent with economic rationality? Depends on definition of economic rationality. if

Rent to Own

2001-09-20 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Why does Rent to Own exist? Isn't rent to own just a way of lending money to the customer (like many auto firms)? One friend said it was a way of selling to people whose religion precludes the paying or charging of interest. Any comments? Fabio

Re: Rent to Own

2001-09-20 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
I just looked on the internet and it is often the case the rent-to-own contract frequently includes a clause stating that the owner pays for repairs. The same web page listed an advantage of RTO was that it allowed people with little cash for a down payment to buy pricy items like home

Re: Handicapping the 2001 Noble Prize in Economics

2001-09-20 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Of course, Bill, the right thing to do would be to state some odds and place a bet. Fabio On Thu, 20 Sep 2001, Bill Dickens wrote: As Fall approaches one of the interesting rituals involves the selection of Nobel Laureates. While I'm not a legitimate bookie, I do engage in some innocuous

Re: Handicapping the 2001 Noble Prize in Economics

2001-09-21 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Other nobel prizes have been awarded to individuals that weren't formally trained. Some literature winners were not fiction writers, a recent physics went to an engineer and medicine/physiology often goes to non-MD biologists. If people started thinking contribution to economic thought, then we

Re: Airlines

2001-09-26 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Couldn't one argue that airlines are similar to roads, telephones and other services necessary for a modern economy? Thus, the gov't might be justified in maintaining transportation in order to promote more general well being. You then sacrifice short term optima for long term benefits. Fabio

Re: Disaster Raises Happiness, Trust

2001-10-01 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
An article in the LA Times discusses how high levels of stress change hormonal balances in the body causing, ahem, sexual arousal during times of stress. I can easily imagine a similar effect for just plain happiness. Fabio On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, Robin Hanson wrote: The Washington Post had

Re: Shutting Down: The 9/11 Excuse?

2001-10-01 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
A lot of firms have been using the attack as an excuse... somehow, terrorists have even inhibited the buying of guitars since The Guitar Center announced potential losses blamed on the attack! Seriously, there may be some truth to things. A business on the brink of bankrupcy depends on the

Armchair attachments

2001-10-29 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
I greatly appreciate the opportunity to read attachments sent by armchair list members, but I humbly request that armchair subscribers *not* send large documents. Rather, please include a URL so that I can download the document to my desktop. Otherwise, it must go through my e-mail account,

Grad school advice

2001-10-31 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
I am not an economist, but I do happen to know a fair amount about graduate school (I've been in two and my dissertation is on higher education): 1) Unless you have a good reason, go to the best/highest prestige school that will accept you. Why? Prestige/repuation tends to correlate with things

RE: Studying Economics

2001-11-02 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Not as much as you think. Of course, if you go to a completely unchallenging school your chance for a top grad school will drop. But grad school committees have pretty good information on their hands when it comes to econ: math grades, math GRE, econ subject GRE. They also have letters of rec.

Taliban Tipping Game

2001-11-14 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Armchair game theory: Does anybody here think that the war in Afghanistan can be characterized as a tipping game? Conscripted Taliban soldiers and residents of Taliban controlled areas could either support the Taliban or not, and are waiting for somebody else to move first. The first victory

Re: Austrians and markets

2001-11-18 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
I'll rephrase what Sherwin Rosen said in some speeches and articles before his death. He argued that Austrian economics includes a number of ideas, which have varying degrees of acceptance in the market place of ideas. The subjective theory of value is accepted by most economists as are other

Haggling:

2001-11-21 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Mike Kinsey on Slate notes that KMart employees are now allowed to haggle over prices. He notes that with the Internet, merchants can instantaneously raise or lower prices to meet demand instead of industrial revolution style fixed prices. I've posted once or twice about haggling and standard

Re: Austrians and markets

2001-11-26 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Don't you think there is a difference between efficiency in the intellectual arena and truth? I think that intellectual institutions are fairly good at allocating resources to efficiently produce normal science - ie, science that refines and explores a given view of the world. Truth may require

Re: 2001 Economic Nobelists

2001-10-10 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
I've read that the Academy tends to clump together Nobelists by topic - the game theory year of Selten, HArsanyi and Nash, for example. Maybe somebody would take it personally, but they shoudln't. Fabio On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Bryan Caplan wrote: In a way, isn't dividing the prize 3 ways a

Re: Friedman Prize

2001-10-10 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
My guess: Thomas Szasz. I really have no idea if he deserves it because I have no notion of what the criteria are but I do know that he's recieved quite a few awards fro the libt'rn crowd. Facetious guess: Bill Gates! Fabio On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Alex Tabarrok wrote: Speaking of prizes,

Re: Signaling

2001-10-15 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Have you considered that the author is my friend may have some information in it? For example, if Robert Reisch endorsed a book, you could reasonably conclude that Robert Reisch is the author's friend and that his friends tend to be liberals with a certain slant. It wouldn't signal the quality

Local news

2001-12-01 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Why is local news done by television stations when most other local programming (soap operas, game shows, talk shows) is contracted out? Or to phrase the question differently: why do local tv stations do *any* of their programming? Fabio

Re: The Median Voter Theorem and Adoption Law

2002-01-07 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
I think the median voter has the following preferences concerning adoption: same race parents parents different race no adoption. Bryan's point is that adoption workers seem to prefer: same race parents no adoption parents different race. The MVT would predict otherwise. I claim that

Re: The Median Voter Theorem and Adoption Law

2002-01-07 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
fabio guillermo rojas wrote: I don't think you should focus so much on the median voter theorem. The logic of median voter theorems is that politicians offer policies that closely resemble the median voter's desires. This assumes that politicians have direct influence over

Re: The Median Voter Theorem and Adoption Law

2002-01-08 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
You are misinterpreting the function of these little issues. Little issues don't build up. Little issues tend to be signals to certain constituencies. For example, nobody has ever lost the vote due to rap music, but Clinton in 1992 signalled to many in the democratic party that he wouldn't be

Re: The Median Voter Theorem and Adoption Law

2002-01-08 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Build-up has two meanings in this context. 1)Politicians could send a series of signals to win small groups of voters. 2) Politicians could send a series of signals to large group of voters who need repeated re-assurances that the politician really means what he says. Ie, build up of votes vs.

Spam: Legal, economic or technical problem?

2002-01-26 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
When faxes were invented, people got pissed off when their valuable fax line was used by unsolicited advertisements. Thus, in many places fax spam is now a legal offense punishable by a large fine for each unwanted faxed message. Ie, the conflict was resolvd simply by having the practice

Re: drink prices

2002-02-03 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Are you sure this is what happened? I'd guess that the woman expected a range of price, and was shocked when when she found out the drink was $13. (1) Where else do people buy things without knowing the price first? (I've been thinking and have been unable to come up with any examples.)

Re: drink prices

2002-02-04 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Actually, I've dealt with this situation and it's quite different than the drink at a bar. When you hire a (decent) carpenter, they will tell you what additional labor cost, should it be required. A reputable contractor will have this written out before hand, and you will have signed an

Re: Decision Markets

2002-02-12 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
be informative for decisions. Anyone want to give odds that I'll be able to keep the term meaning what I want it to mean? :-) According to Stigler (the statistician, not the economist) almost every named scientific term is in error. So I'd say the odds are huge that your name will be

Re: privatize parking spaces - market failure?

2002-02-17 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
I understand that some toll roads charge more during rush hour. It's not as sensitive a mechanism as Fred suggested, but it's not bad. Fabio I was looking for, but such a system would be hard to implement. Can you think of an existing analogous system in a similar market? Would there be a

Economics of rank vs. Economics of the most money

2002-02-20 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
This week's Economist magazine reported an experiment where subjects could pay to decrease the income of other subjects in the experiment, which they did with some frequency, although it didn't increase their income from the experiment. The article's author suggest that this was evidence for

Re: Economics of rank vs. Economics of the most money

2002-02-21 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Maybe the real puzzle is under what conditions do people maximize rank or total stuff. F It doesn't have to be complicated, but it does have to be specific. A business trying to maximize market share is pretty specific, though with multiple product lines and sets of consumers there remains

Re: Campaign finance changes

2002-03-03 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Hypothesis: John McCain. Campaing reform has been a favorite to talk about but not to pass for many years. I think that when you had a charismatic cadidate adopt an issue, it can really change things. I bet a lot of congressmen saw little John McCains in their night mares if they opposed campign

MBA's for senior exec's

2002-03-11 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Why do older executives desire MBA's or B-school Ph.D.'s? They don't need to signal brains because they have a track record, and they won't learn much useful stuff. It can't terribly useful credential when you are in mid or late career. Any takes? or is this just consumption on the part of

RE: Emotions and Entrepeneurship

2002-04-01 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
My just comment is that we should not use irrational expectations term in this discuss, because nobody, for sure know the difference between rationality and irrationality of human beigns. regards; santosh I'm just using the phrase irrational expectations in a sense similar to how many

Panic Room and Beautiful Mind

2002-04-04 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Talking about game theory movies - does anyone remember if the game depicted in Beuatiful Mind accurately capture the Nash eq? Fabio David Fincher's new movie *Panic Room* may be the finest artistic expression of game theory around. Beautiful illustrations of commitment problems, subgame

RE: Ph.D. proliferation

2002-04-06 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
orientation. Thus, as we become wealthier as a society, we are more able to support children who pursue such uselss topics at the graduate level. Why, this could mean that the wealthy feel some sort of urge to preserve civilization! Michael You are a very deluded person if you think

Re: economic history question

2002-04-10 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Most observers have always been very surprised that there never was a big demand for socialism in the United States - even at the height of the depression. The New Deal was very much driven by the Executive branch not by Congress - thus I think things could have been quite different

Re: PhD Gluts

2002-04-11 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
2) To attract good thinkers to become historians, schools must keep the wage high enough to compete with other disciplines and occupations that require intelligence. Therefore, I think this is a big part of it. Compeitition to get into the best humanities programs is as fierce as law

Re: Grade Inflation

2002-04-15 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
The effect of this is to draw students away from math, science and economics and towards the softer social sciences. Similarly, within departments students are drawn away from harder graders and towards softer graders. Budgets go where students go! Thus grade inflation causes a

Re: Economists' views

2002-04-20 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Why don't you email Bryan Caplan, this list serve's moderator and founder? He's published stuff on exactly these issues. Fabio Rojas On Sat, 20 Apr 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is there a website that might have data on the opinions of economists on general questions like the role of

Re: nafta

2002-04-21 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
I recently visited a web page by a political scientist that seemed to suggest that NAFTA was a failure. I'd -jsh Could you summarize the evidence he/she presents? Fabio

What is a market?

2002-04-28 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Imagine that an alien arrives on planet earth and asks you what is a market? What kind of economic system would count as a market? I know this can be a sticky question, but how would you describe the economy of Russia or China, and why doesn't it count as a market? Is it just the lack of the

Re: In Praise of Pay Toilets

2002-05-28 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Plausible, but then the question is: *why* do people have a disutility of paying for toilets? Does this fit into any pattern of the sorts of things people have a disutility of paying for? As noted earlier, people did pay for toilets before and it is common in Europe. So it seems we are

Re: Not such a fantastically entertaining paper

2002-06-20 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Let me also add that the basic assumption of Frey's article is also wrong - the assumption that editors slavishly follow referee's. My take is that it's editors choose referees, so the editor's really do choose the articles because they choose referees and indirectly choose the outcomes. Fabio

Re: Republican Reversal

2002-06-26 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
These are all good comments on the Republican reversal. Thus, I take it that the list agrees that democracy works pretty well in reflecting the wishes of the voters. Alex I'd say democracy reflects general trend in voter opinion pretty well, although some policies may be way out of whack.

Re: double vs. single entry

2002-06-27 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Double entry means that you have one column for money going out of an account and one column for money going into an account. Thus, it very easy to keep track of cash inflow and outflow (just add up the columns). With single entry, there is more error because you mistakenly count a debit as a

Re: double vs. single entry

2002-06-27 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
What's wrong with negative numbers?! Prof. Bryan Caplan Bryan - it's not mathematical. It's book keeping. Keeping the two columns separate is simply easier for finding mistakes. With spreadsheets its easy, but if its teh 13th century and all is done by

Re: double vs. single entry

2002-06-27 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
On Thu, 27 Jun 2002, William Dickens wrote: Does anyone answering here know any accounting or are people just guessing? Just enter double entry accounting into google and you can easily find some answers. It hard for us modern people to understand, but simply accounting techniques can make a

Autism, brain damage and cooperation

2002-07-12 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
In any case, all of the deficiencies in children's brains you point out more or less sound like extensions of their low absolute IQ. Not really. One listed deficiency is memory. That might be correlated with IQ, but it's certainly not the same as IQ. Analogy: a computer with a small storage

Re: Autism, brain damage and cooperation

2002-07-12 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Come on, Fab - pointing out examples of brain differences explaining behavioral differences is hardly convincing evidence that brain differences are the right explanation in this case. My point is that behavior is more than cost-benefit calculations with IQ as an intervening variable. My

Why do people pick stocks?

2002-07-12 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
If it is common knowledge that picking stocks is no better than using an index, then why is stock picking so popular? Ie, why do people accept lower returns just for the privilige of picking the stocks themselves? Fabio

RE: Republican Reversal

2002-07-17 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
In the real world we have almost 600 in Congress, dealing with innumerable matters more or less simultaneously. One of the things each CongressCritter does is to decide what to do not about, say, farm subsidies generally, but about SB1234, sponsored by Sen. This and Sen. That, which goes

Re: New article on cooperation the brain

2002-07-18 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
When I play the prisoner's dilemma in class, I see very little cooperation. I know one researcher who has repeated a trust game (not prisoner's dilemma) with many classes of students and groups of business men. He finds that students are remarkably untrustworthy and businessmen tend to give

Re: New article on cooperation the brain

2002-07-18 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
The part about students being socially isolated from each other and lacking social experienceis interesting. Are there any studies that might confirm this? I teach at a community college, so the students probabl mix with each other less than they do at other colleges. If I recall

Re: Public Opinion On Spending

2002-07-31 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
In other words, all of the main items in the budget are popular and indeed if anything the public wants them to be larger. (Presumably views Question: could public opinion be endogenous? Ie, maybe there might be some status quo bias? Would people before the New Deal or the Great Society have

Re: cultural cues and queues

2002-08-03 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Alternative hypothesis: people will accept money only if other people are accepting money. Fred - next weekend, I want you recruit a person who will get in line before you. When you arrive, announce that you will give $20 to somebody who will let you cut in line. That planted person will then

Re: taxi transitional gains trap

2002-08-04 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Is there really a transitional gains trap? If a majority of NYers seriously wanted free entry in cabs, wouldn't it happen regardless of the opinions of cab companies? Prof. Bryan Caplan Uh-oh. The Median Voter Theorem rears its ugly head again.

Re: Why Compact Cars Identical?

2002-08-12 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
That makes sense for the cars all made by the same company, or which share subcontractors. But Toyota, Honda, Subaru, and Ford all make cars with virtually the same shape and layout. Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Among management theory/organizational sociology

Re: Why Compact Cars Identical?

2002-08-12 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Or to rephrase in economic terms, risk averse managers prefer copying a proven strategy (low risk/low payoff) than engaging in RD (high payoff/high risk). reduce drag coefficients to increase fuel economy. The summer I sold cars (1997 at a Pontiac-Mazda-Jeep-Eagle dealer) one of the

Re: Nations as Corporations

2002-08-14 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Imagine that a nation like the US were run like a corporation. To live How would you enforce shareholder rights and monitor managers? For corporations inside nations, one could appeal to the state for law enforcement or start a lawsuit. What recourse do shareholders have in such a worlds?

Re: charlatanism

2002-08-14 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Does anyone think, at least in the excerpts we read, that the article attacked libertarian or libertarian-leaning economics as much as it attacked economics generally? David Levenstam It's typical to say that bad science is X, and my political opponents just happen to do X. IMO, it is

Re: charlatanism

2002-08-14 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
The real charlatans in academia are the many frauds who build their whole careers by getting their names put on coauthored papers to which they have not legitimately contributed. That's a sort of embezzlement; but `charlatan' implies that the *content* of the papers is fraudulent. Anton

Re: Nations as Corporations

2002-08-14 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Are state-enforced lawsuits really what keeps large multinational corporations honest now? If not, then the concept here is to use mechanisms similar to whatever large corporations now use. Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Multinationals come in different flavors.

Re: Median Voter and Sampling

2002-08-28 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
But I do have a naive question: Is there a median voter for each issue, so that if there n issues, there can be up to n median voters? Or, is there only one median voter who satisfies the vector median as I described above? Can such a person be proven to exist, sort of like a voter

Re: Median Voter and Sampling

2002-08-28 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Another MVT deviation: Marijuana decriminalization Fabio

Re: Feral Children

2002-09-06 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Diego! Diego! The definitive source on outlandish, but possibly true facts is the weekly Straight Dope Column in the Chicago Reader, written by Cecil Adams. To sum up Cecil's column, yes, there a few authenticated cases of feral children, but most researchers doubt that any of these were raised

Why does tenure exist?

2002-09-17 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Seriously, why does tenure exist at all? I know the motivations for tenure, but why isn't it competed away somehow? I would like to know what economic process ensures its continued existence. Fabio

Re: Why does tenure exist?

2002-09-18 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
raise. Government subsidies and private charity give universities the cushion they need to avoid being put out of competition by performance-oriented for-profits. Prof. Bryan Caplan While I share Bryan's skepticism, I don't buy his argument because

Re: Why does tenure exist?

2002-09-19 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
One possible explanation for tenure is that university departments are to a large degree worker managed firms. One problem with a worker David Friedman David's explanations make sense, but I'm empirically skeptical on two grounds: (1) Why is it that only educational worker managed firms

Re: Traffic School and Vehicle Insurance

2002-10-04 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
It seems to me, that traffic school makes everybody out to be a greater risk than their driving record indicates. If risk is a primary factor in an insurance company's rate determination, doesn't that mean that traffic school makes everybody's rates higher than they otherwise would Be?

Journal response times

2002-10-13 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Anyone have any idea why the norm in economics allows referees so much time to do a report? Why its so different from other fields? Is this one of those soft vs. hard field things? Its my impression that the physical science journals all want fast turn around on their referee reports.

RE: Journal response times

2002-10-14 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
The data are average times (measured in months) between initial submission and acceptance at various economics journals in the year 1999. It seems that the long times quoted in this article are something different than what fabio was talking about. I have not read the article but the

RE: Journal response times

2002-10-15 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
friend had a paper go three rounds at AER and that took 3 years. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of bad papers get rejected quickly and that would bring down the average turn around time a lot. That is indeed the case. Journals get many papers of low quality, and it's easy to reject the bad

Theory of Teams

2002-10-18 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Occasionally, someone mentions the theory of teams. Can someone please tell me what the economic theory of teams is? Fabio

Re: Economists job market/search costs

2002-11-01 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
Having publications before you go on the market can make a very big difference. At least 10 years ago very few people did and having - - Bill Dickens An article in the Journal of Human Resources about 10 years ago showed that having 1 article had a big effect on landing a job, 2 articles a

Re: Self-assesment vs. Rationality

2002-11-10 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
I presume you mean irrationaly optimistic self-assesment? I'd say quite a lot. But then comes the hard question: what policy implications follow from this conclusion? Yes, irrat self-assesment is a good word for it. Robin, I know you are a fan of taxing people for not using their

Re: University overhead

2002-12-04 Thread fabio guillermo rojas
How sticky is the price for university overhead? Fabio On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Rodney F Weiher wrote: As a purchaser of university research, we often bargain with the PI on overhead, who in turn must bargain with their administration. Rodney Weiher fabio guillermo rojas wrote: Do

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