Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics

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EJW welcomes Brendan Beare as co-editor

EJW welcomes UCSD associate professor Brendan Beare to the team as co-editor. Professor Beare grew up in Australia, earned his B.S. from University of New South Wales, and later an M.A. in statistics and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale. Expert in statistical and econometric theory, Beare has published two papers in EJW, and his work also has appeared in Econometric Theory, Econometrica, Journal of Time Series Analysis, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Econometrics and Statistics, and several other journals. EJW looks forward to working with Professor Beare and thanks him for his support of the project.

Thank you to Garett Jones

Garett Jones has given three years as co-editor, making invaluable contributions to Econ Journal Watch. We are enormously grateful for his generosity, but understand his need to focus on book projects. Look for his next—10 Percent Less Democracy—from Stanford University Press in February 2020.

New publication schedule for EJW

Econ Journal Watch will change its publication schedule to two issues per year, March and September. So the next issue will be that of March 2019.

Who Should Get the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Why? A Call for Proposals

Econ Journal Watch plans a symposium on who should get the Nobel prize in economics, and why. The aim is not to canvass for opinion about who should get the prize, but to generate essay-form appreciations of the work of individual economists.

Send your proposal to write an essay explaining why Person A should receive a Nobel prize in economics to Jason Briggeman (EJW Managing Editor), at jason@briggeman.org. We also welcome mere queries in such direction.

Some guidelines:

  • Proposers should be qualified to explain the merit of the work of Person A.
  • As we know, the prize sometimes goes to a person in the social sciences but not strictly economics, and in this project we certainly share that spirit.
  • The essay about Person A could be written by multiple authors.
  • We think it fine if the authors cooperate with Person A in producing and drafting the essay; any such cooperation may go acknowledged or unacknowledged, as the parties involved see fit.
  • The essay should aim to touch on all of Person A’s work, though it is fine of course to focus on the contributions that are especially thought to make Person A worthy of the prize.
  • The essay should be candid about significant shortcomings of A’s most important contributions, and significant criticisms.
  • We welcome proposals about Person A regardless of his or her ideological orientation. Proposers may expect ideological outlook to play no role in approving proposals.
  • We shall need to be selective about the Person A. Although not every Person A needs to be regarded by us as an actually conceivable prospective prize-winner, we do need to regard the Person A as sufficiently eminent, accomplished, or interesting to warrant such attention.
  • The case for Person A may involve justification “outside the box” of what we may think of as normal criteria for a Nobel prize in economics. Such unconventional justification for Person A is not unwelcome, but it may itself call for some justification within the essay.

We aim to publish the symposium in one of the issues of the year 2020.

Econ Journal Watch moves to the Fraser Institute

In 2007 EJW was done the great honor and service of being taken in by Atlas Network (then called the Atlas Economic Research Foundation), thanks especially to the kindness of Alejandro Chafuen, Brad Lips, Romulo Lopez, and the late Leonard Liggio. After ten years of generous support and always excellent assistance from Atlas, EJW is moving under a new roof. EJW will be ever grateful to Atlas for the tremendous help and friendship given to the project. We thank also Atlas friends (present and past) Harry Kalsted and Jim Cardillo.

EJW is honored again to be given the opportunity to move to the Fraser Institute, Canada’s leading think tank. The Fraser Institute is one of the great classical liberal organizations, and it is the parent of the Economic Freedom Project led by James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, Joshua Hall, and Fred McMahon; EJW has published numerous articles that make significant use of the index (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). (Here is Fraser's announcement of the partnership.) The move has been facilitated by the Institute’s Executive Vice-President Jason Clemens. EJW is proud indeed to have a partner in the Fraser Institute, and very grateful.

EJW apology to Professor Farley Grubb

From Daniel Klein: In 2006 (vol. 3, no. 2), Econ Journal Watch published an article titled “Farley Grubb’s Noisy Evasions on Colonial Money.” Professor Grubb has lately shared with us his sentiments about that title. EJW is edited so as to allow boisterous give and take (particularly when issuing from commented-on authors), but we at EJW now feel, sincerely, that that title was overly derisive, and that it was unprofessional on our part. We apologize to Farley Grubb for that title, and we are grateful to him for having communicated with his thoughts on the matter.

Langbert, Quain, and Klein to rectify coverage error

by Daniel B. Klein

Sean T. Stevens, in preparing a blog post for Heterodox Academy about the Langbert, Quain, and Klein article in EJW, scrutinized the article and caught a problem, and then kindly sent us a query about it.

Sean noticed that in footnote 5 (p. 424) we list University of Florida and University of Miami as among those universities that, though ranked high enough by U.S. News to be included in our investigation, were not included because they sit in states not covered by Aristotle (the database used for the study).

But Sean noticed that in footnote 4 (p. 423), listing the states not included in Aristotle, Florida is not listed. In fact, Florida is covered by Aristotle. In fact, those two Florida universities should have been included in our investigation.

To rectify the problem, we need to investigate the two universities that have been mistakenly left out of our analysis, which covered 40 universities. Although our subscription to Aristotle had expired, Aristotle has generously restored to us temporary access, to rectify the problem. We are proceeding now and will report back on the findings; look for a notice here at EJW News.

We are grateful to Sean for catching our error and bringing it to our attention!

UPDATE: We have made the corrections, publishing them in a brief article published in the January 2017 issue of EJW: “Faculty Voter Registration: Rectifying the Omission of Two Florida Universities.”