Wednesday assorted links

1. “Exploiting within-country and industry-level variation in regulatory burden, the analysis finds a large, positive effect of regulatory burden on corruption.

2. “Resumes that list study abroad experience in Europe for one year are 20 percent less likely to receive any callback and 35 percent less likely to receiving a call back for an interview, relative to resumes that do not list study abroad experience.

3. “…colleges that ultimately boost earnings also tend to boost persistence, BA completion, and STEM degrees along the way.” Lots more in that paper.

4. “Singapore Airlines is the first major carrier to serve produce harvested just hours before a flight.

5. I wish to thank and praise my Lubbock hosts, the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech.

6. 2006 study of the possible economic impact of avian flu.  Possibly 4.25% of gdp.

Addendum, from the comments, from Aleh:

You don’t need to read the study-abroad paper to realize that it’s implausible. 35% less likely to receive an interview! That would be approaching the impact that’s been found for declaring a criminal record. And it it has to be in Europe specifically, and one year specifically!

Ok, the paper itself. Overall, study abroad per se has no effect. So they slice and dice by location, length, and whether it is a call-back of an interview request, and use a significance level of 0.1, and then – as you’d expect – a couple of weak “findings” appear. A year of Europe seems VERY bad (and yet two weeks in Europe, or any time in Asia, actually improves the raw numbers; that’s the theory there?). Going to Asia doesn’t show a statistically significant change in your chance of getting a callback, unless it’s a callback specifically asking for an interview – when it does help so.

The data here is under-powered and reaches to find any results (slicing and dicing, 0.1 threshold). The “statistical significance filter” works in such cases to ensure that when does one does find a statistically significant result, it will be be a massively overstated – if true at all. A year in Europe doesn’t just have the opposite sign effect than any other experience; it has an absolutely catastrophic effect (-35%). Just no.

This is bad statistics and (not necessarily the authors’ fault) thoughtless promotion of almost a self-evidently implausible claim. If there’s anything to be learned or honestly reported here, it’s the top level finding: that a reasonably controlled experiment found essentially no difference either way by adding study-abroad experience to your resume.

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