2月26日
头脑各个部位打架，好难定位，颇有点精神分裂的味道。
A good and quite (relatively) new (in the economics community) perspective on the role of government in education.
I like Lant's emphasis on policy relevance, although he, as a top practioner and researcher of economic policy, might be overly critical of the community of academic economics. Political economy of production is quite a underdeveloped field.
Some key sentences:
This alternative model has two key differences from NAP. First, there is an actor called “the state” which chooses policies. The state has its own objective function which is in general not simply an aggregation of individual preferences (although in a super special case of a political system that perfectly replicated an aggregation of preferences it could be). The state’s objective function has as a direct argument: the beliefs inculcated in schools.
The first element is therefore “state ideology” (SI)—the state chooses policies to maximize its own objective function and the discrepancy between the beliefs inculcated in the schools children attend and the state’s “ideal” beliefs enters directly as an argument in its objective function4.
The second element is that the effective inculcation of beliefs, unlike the teaching of skills, is very costly for a third party to observe because one cannot pretend to have skills one doesn’t have, but it is relatively easy to pretend to have beliefs one doesn’t have.
In a paper titled “Ideal Vouchers” Caroline Hoxby (2001) takes this argument further showing that essentially anything direct production can do (that is observable) vouchers can do better.
While the government production of schools is sometimes used as an argument for their commitment to universal schooling, there is a simple plausible argument that governments produce schooling as their only support is production precisely because they are not committed to universal schooling.
This near complete lack of interest in displacement effects—I could find only two studies of the topic, both quite recent--is consistent with an objective function increasing in the proportion enrolled in publicly controlled schools.
Here there is substantial variation across countries in the extent to which higher education is carried out by publicly controlled versus private institutions. There has never been an explanation of this variation in instruments in terms of variation across contexts in the underlying market model or constraint sets across countries.
The SC-ICS model can be extended to have concerns for socialization/ideological control at both the mass and higher levels—which explains both the government engagement in this area (even without invoking any market failures) and could potentially explain variations across countries in the level of support across levels of schooling (depending on whether governments most wish to control ideology at the mass or elite levels).
It is easy to admit that NAP is wrong, and in fact, surely no one believes that anyone really believes the normative model of welfare economics makes a
good policy model of the political economy of policy-making (and not just of schooling policy)? But however much economists may claim not to believe NAP, when it comes to defining what research is “policy relevant” they have no other standard.
Gelbach and Pritchett (2002) present a model of targeting in which policy recommendations which ignore political constraints are not only sub-optimal—the “politically naïve” policy choices are pessimal for the poor, the group the “policy maker” in the model was intending to help22. Fischel (2001) argues that the attempt of the courts in California to impose fiscal equalization in spending across districts in California without understanding the political economy of taxation to support schoolings led to the destruction of voter support for property taxation that supported educational spending and was, at least in part, responsible for undermining educational budgets in California.
2月21日
Interesting and promising field for both research and practice.
Also behavioral public economics
2月18日
There are already some works on this:
2月16日
今天看到MSN上一朋友的昵称改为“活在边缘”。原来是“living on edge,” too much work to do. 俺不说我也是living on edge,因为回到美国后这两周基本还是在调整，听课是听了不少，但还没有定下来focus看书。
不过，“活在边缘”倒也是蛮适合我（及类似的一小撮人）的状态：长期目标在于严谨可靠（当然啥叫严谨可靠，可能并没有统一标准）的policy-related research in (applied) social science，活在academic与policy的交汇处。
要rigid, critical,要扎实,又要考虑政策意义；关注政策含义，又不能流于表面，信口开河。时常要平衡。
Key words: Economics, Political Economy, Policy Research, China Studies
2月8日
不字篇：不矫情，不谄媚，不骄妄，不虚妄，不武断，不吹牛，不（太）功利，不claim beyond what the arguments can support。。。（待续）
有字篇：有思想，求真知(instead of interests, illusory reputation) 。。。（待续）
2月7日
Last semester we (I with several smart Econ students) finished a simple paper on trust and cooperation in a lab experiment of public good provision "One Step at a Time: Do Threshold Patterns Matter In Public Good Provision?" (see
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1315798). The time for completing the experiment and paper is really limited, and it has major shortcomings, especially on thoery and real world implication.
Seeking comments from professors and so on. It's a bit interesting and also very simple for your reading.
Today I found that our paper is listed as a suggested reading in a MIT course (MIT 11.902, ADVANCED LOCAL PUBLIC FINANCE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: COLLECTIVE ACTION AND THE PROVISION OF PUBLIC GOODS, see
http://dusp.mit.edu/media/pdf/syllabi/11.902.pdf.) This is a bit exciting. Just a bit, of course, since available comments from some profs are really critical and even harsh, and this MIT course is in Urban Planning department, not economics department, and it's just listed as a suggested reading. And I know it's just a small contribution.
Asher, Sam, Casaburi, Lorenzo, Nikolov, Plamen and Ye, Maoliang,One Step at a Time: Do Threshold Patterns Matter In Public Good Provision?(December 13, 2008). Available at SSRN:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1315798or:
Deaton, a great economist, points out some fundamental methodology pitfalls in two popular tools of quantitive methods in economics: instrumental variable (IV) and randomized controlled trials (RCTs), and critize the overuse and misuse of such tools.
For a useful communications between economists and other social scientists, and to establish a real reputation of economists among social science and policy world, we (those empirical economists who are urged to publish top papers) should take Deaton's critism seriously and reveal the mechanism behind data, even you may disagree with him in some aspects.
See http://www.nber.org/papers/w14690. INSTRUMENTS OF DEVELOPMENT: RANDOMIZATION IN THE TROPICS, AND THE
SEARCH FOR THE ELUSIVE KEYS TO ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
" Economists’ claims to methodological superiority based on instrumental variables ring particularly hollow when it is economists themselves
who are often misled. My argument is that for both economists and non-economists, the direct consideration of the reduced form is likely to generate productive lines of enquiry. "
"... it is so dangerous to make inferences from natural experiments without understanding the mechanisms at work."
Abstract: There is currently much debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid and about what kind of projects can engender economic development. There is skepticism about the ability of econometric analysis to resolve these issues, or of development agencies to learn from their own experience. In response, there is movement in development economics towards the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to accumulate credible knowledge of what works, without over-reliance on questionable theory or statistical methods. When RCTs are not possible, this movement advocates quasi-randomization through instrumental variable (IV) techniques or natural experiments. I argue that many of these applications are unlikely to recover quantities that are useful for policy or understanding: two key issues are the misunderstanding of exogeneity, and the handling of heterogeneity. I illustrate from the literature on aid and growth. Actual randomization faces similar problems as quasi-randomization, notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary. I argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods, and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statistical or epistemic superiority. I illustrate using prominent experiments in development. As with IV methods, RCT-based evaluation of projects is unlikely to lead to scientific progress in the understanding of economic development. I welcome recent trends in development experimentation away from the evaluation of projects and towards the evaluation of theoretical mechanisms.
2月6日
Raj Chetty (Econ) and Robert Jensen (Kennedy)
Last two paragraphs, EXACTLY.
In the decades since, the laces have been unpicked. It is not just that economists are nosing into new fields of social behaviour. They have been doing that at least since Gary Becker of the University of Chicago wrote about crime and the family in the 1960s and 1970s. But today’s economists show no great attachment to the rational model of behaviour that guided Mr Becker. Economic theory has become so eclectic that ingenious researchers can usually cook up a plausible model to explain whatever empirical results they find interesting. Economics is now defined neither by its subject matter nor by its method.
What, then, unites these eight young stars and the discipline they may come to dominate? Economists still share a taste for the Greek alphabet: they like to provide formal, algebraic accounts of the behaviour they explain. And they pride themselves on the sophistication of their investigative methods. They are usually better at teasing confessions out of data than their rivals in other social sciences. What defines economics? Economics is what economists do—the best of them, anyway.
回国一个多月，天气和生活真好。回到学校了，一个字:学.
工具 
