Results for “banerjee” 68 found
Who will win the economics Nobel Prize this year?
Diane Coyle mentions some possible picks:
Environmental economics: Partha Dasgupta, William Nordhaus
Update: Twitter folks strongly recommend adding Martin Weitzman in this category.
Growth: Paul Romer, Robert Barro
Inequality: Anthony Atkinson, Angus Deaton
Innovation (and much else): Will Baumol (now 93!)
Econometrics: David Hendry
All good guesses. I’ll add Diamond and Dybvig for banking, and possibly an early grant to Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer for development and RCTs. That would make economics look scientific, for a year at least. I expect Bernanke, Woodford, and Svensson to get a prize as well for monetary economics, although probably not right now. It is too close to Bernanke’s memoir and Svensson’s tenure at the Swedish central bank.
Here is a WSJ list. What do you think? Since I’ve never once been right about a particular year, trying to pick someone would only curse them. The award will come this Monday of course.
The new RCT results on poverty reduction
Declan Butler reports:
Giving some of the world’s poorest people a two-year aid package — including cash, food, health-care services, skills training and advice — improves their livelihoods for at least a year after the support is cut off, according to the results of an experiment involving more than 10,000 households in six countries.
The poverty intervention had already been trialled successfully in Bangladesh, and the study’s researchers say it shows the approach works in other cultures too. “We finally have truly credible evidence that a programme for the poorest of the poor can really help them meaningfully reduce their poverty,” says Dean Karlan, an economist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and a co-author of the study, reported today in Science. “Until now, we haven’t really been able to go to a government outside Bangladesh and say, we’re confident this works.”
Ethiopia, one of the countries that was in the trial, is planning to continue and scale up the intervention to cover around 3 million people, says Karlan, and Pakistan and India are considering scaling up interventions, too.
Banerjee and Duflo are involved in the work as well, and this is sometimes called the “graduation model,” because the aim is to graduate people out of poverty. Note this:
The intervention is not cheap. Costs per household ranged from $1,455 in India to $5,962 in Pakistan, although they were offset by positive returns on investment ranging from 133% in Ghana to 433% in India. The researchers hope to cut costs in future by scaling back the experiment’s more expensive components, such as training.
And while the model worked in many places, it failed in rural southern India and Honduras, in part due to…problems with chickens. Nonetheless this is big, big news. The link to the original research is here.
For pointers I thank Kevin Lewis and Michelle Dawson.
On-line education at the AEA meetings in Philadelphia
I can recommend to you all the session Economics Education in the Digital Age, scheduled for Saturday, January 4, at 10:15 a.m.
Nancy Rose is chairing the proceedings and presented papers will be by Caroline Hoxby, Banerjee and Duflo, and Acemoglu, Laibson, and List, as well as by Alex and myself. They are all very interesting papers, as you would expect from these economists.
Thomson Reuters predicts the 2013 Nobel Laureate in economics
Joshua D. Angrist, David E. Card, Alan B. Krueger, Sir David F. Hendry, M. Hashem Pesaran, Peter C.B. Phillips, Sam Peltzman, and Richard A. Posner, all very good possible picks in my view.
My personal prediction (which never once has been correct, at least not in the proper year) is for an early “shock” prize to Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer, in part to show (try to show?) that economics really is an actual science.
In any case the above link offers Reuters picks for the science prizes as well. Here are some other speculations for the science prizes as well.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Assorted links
1. The KFC culture that is Japan, and Pizza Hut innovation from China.
2. Critical review of Banerjee and Duflo.
3. What really happened in the Anglo-Irish deal?
4. Competitive wood planing, and does the CBO believe in the great stagnation?
5. Do people swap genes more easily than folk tales?
Handicapping the 2012 Nobel
This article mentions Alvin Roth, Bob Shiller, Richard Thaler, Robert Barro, Lars Hansen, Anthony Atkinson, Angus Deaton, Jean Tirole, Stephen Ross, and William Nordhaus.
I’ll predict a triple prize to Shiller, Thaler, and Eugene Fama. Fama clearly deserves it, can’t win it solo (too strongly EMH in an age of financial crisis), but can be bundled with two people from behavioral finance and irrational exuberance theories.
Barro will get it, but not in an election year. Hansen and Ross are good picks but I don’t see them getting it before Fama does. Paul Romer deserves mention but this is probably not his year because of politics in Honduras.
William Baumol cannot be ruled out. A neat idea — but unlikely — is Martin Feldstein and Joseph Newhouse for their pioneering work in health care economics, plus for Feldstein there is public finance too.
Tirole and Nordhaus are deserving perennials, with various bundlings (e.g., Oliver Hart, or for Nordhaus other names in environmental). I hope the Krueger-Tullock idea is not dead but I would bet against it, same with Armen Alchian and Albert Hirschman. Dale Jorgensen has a shot.
I believe Duflo and Banerjee (and possibly Michael Kremer too, maybe even Robert Townsend) will get it sooner than people are expecting, though not this year as they just presented in Stockholm. Next year I think.
Not once in the past have I been right about this.
Addendum: Here is the talk from Northwestern.
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
You will find it here. The contents include:
James Tooley on Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics: Banerjee and Duflo propose to bypass the “big questions” of economic development and focus instead on “small steps” to improvement. But, says Tooley, they proceed to make big judgments about education in developing countries, judgments not supported by their own evidence.
Why the Denial? Pauline Dixon asks why writers at UNESCO, Oxfam, and elsewhere have denied or discounted the success and potentiality of private schooling in developing countries.
Neither necessary nor sufficient, but… Thomas Mayer critically appraises Stephen Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey’s influential writings, particularly The Cult of Statistical Significance. McCloskey and Ziliak reply.
Was Occupational Licensing Good for Minorities? Daniel Klein, Benjamin Powell, and Evgeny Vorotnikov take issue with a JLE article by Marc Law and Mindy Marks. Law and Marks reply.
Mankiw vs. DeLong and Krugman on the CEA’s Real GDP Forecasts in Early 2009: David Cushman shows how a careful econometrician might have adjudicated the debate among these leading economists over the likelihood of a macroeconomic rebound.
Assorted links
1. Does money make us write better?
2. Is peak oil dead?
3. Interview with Enrico Moretti.
4. Ngram viewer for “Risk Management,” via Andrew Schroeder.
Reminiscences of Miles Kimball, and others
Miles and I were in the same entering class in Harvard. Miles and Abhijit Banerjee were for economic theory the sharpest students in the group and it must have been an absolute terror to teach them. Both were gentlemanly in the extreme, but if a mistake or ambiguity were on the board, or in a paper, you could be sure they would find it and point it out. I recall Abhijit answering a question on the macro final exam and showing that what he thought would be the supposed Harvard faculty member answer was in fact wrong, in addition to solving for the right answer, finding a few other possible equilibria, and acing the rest of the exam in but a few hours’ time. Steve Kaplan, from the same class, later became known as an empirical economist but his theoretical acumen was remarkably good. Those three dominated a lot of the discussions. Mathias Dewatripont was also no slouch in theory though temperamentally quieter. Alan Krueger, in his third year, obtained the reputation of having the best eye for an important empirical paper and how to execute it; he learned the most from Larry Summers. Nouriel Roubini was generally quiet, though he looked all-knowing and at times slightly jaded.
Brad DeLong was a few years older. He was thought of as the slightly right-wing guy (compared to his peers he was) who read a lot of unusual history of economic thought, including Adam Ferguson. He and his girlfriend (now wife) were inseparable and always affectionate.
Miles struck me as a mind in perpetual motion, in the best sense of that phrase. I was not surprised, in 1984, when I heard about his linguistics Master’s thesis, which includes a learned and original discussion of Charles Peirce. Miles is also a cousin of Mitt Romney, and he will soon blog “Will Mitt’s Mormonism Make Him a Supply-Side Liberal?”. I wonder what he makes of us all.
Here are his early tweets.
One feature about his blog which is refreshing is that he is neither a libertarian nor a progressive, though he incorporates ideas from both approaches. My RSS feed is mostly libertarians and progressives, but that is part of the strange selection mechanism of the blogosphere, not a reflection of the economics profession.
Again, Miles’s blog is here and Miles on Twitter is here. Most of all, he seems to be a great dad, or at least his daughter thinks so. She too is studying at Harvard, for an MBA. Here is her project Expert Novice, “Every month or so, I write a letter about what I’ve learned lately.”
Development economics of education bleg
What should I read? There is no need to re-recommend Banerjee and Duflo, Lant Pritchett, or James Tooley on this topic, namely education in developing countries. What else? I thank you in advance for your counsel.
Assorted links
Three new additions to my pile
Jonathan Schlefer, The Assumptions Economists Make.
James K. Galbraith, Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis.
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. Not their only co-authorship, now out in paperback.
Assorted links
1. The Cal State system, America’s largest, will take significant steps into on-line education.
2. Robot prejudice.
3. A new Banerjee and Duflo paper (pdf), RCTs and governance.
4. More on the Apple job creation claims.
5. More on Iceland and Canada; they seem to want to go back to a fixed exchange rate, life as a floater isn’t always so simple.
The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers
The new list has been published and I am pleased and honored to have made it. The non-economists include such figures as Obama, Merkel, Sarkozy, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. The economists — plenty of them — include Krugman, Stiglitz, Reinhart and Rogoff, Roubini, Lant Pritchett, and Duflo and Banerjee. To engage in some superficial self-reflection, the striking thing about the list is that everyone on it is either a) more successful than I am, or b) has been to jail or is headed there. Somehow I expect to continue to evade both categories. Both Rogoff and I recommended the Frank Brady biography of Bobby Fischer. My entering PhD. class put three people on the list, Roubini and Banerjee being the other two.