As part of my Comparative Methods course, I assigned the book Counterfactuals and Causal Inference by (Cornell sociologist) Stephen Morgan and Christopher Winship. That means—do students know this?—that I had read it again myself before we discuss it next Wednesday. On…
A short note from Japan, where I am visiting for what is officially the shortest trans-Pacific work trip of my life (38 hours and 55 minutes, assuming my flight tomorrow night leaves on time). I’m here to talk about crises,…
The dork blogs are all abuzz about this working paper (PDF) by Keith Chen entitled “The Effects of Language on Economic Behavior.” Here’s the abstract Languages differ widely in the ways they partition time. In this paper I test the…
Phil Arena has posted a very nice review of Clarke and Primo. Here is the money sentence: There are of course differences between empirical models and theoretical models, but they are fewer and more modest than many empiricists realize. I…
I’m in the process of working on a short piece for New Mandala on Islam in a post-BN world. In the course of doing this, I’ve been reading carefully some of the goals of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS). I…
Via Marc Bellamare, whose blog I generally enjoy, I have come across an interview with the editors of the World Bank Economic Review. It contains this doozy of a warning to anyone doing research on development policy, broadly considered: “Our…
Last week, my grad course on Comparative Methods read about where research ideas come from and what makes research “good.” Almost everyone who tries to write on this topic agrees that the best research is “interesting,” and it is “important,”…
This is a post about Thailand, not the U.S. In the Thai context, republican means literally in favor of a republic, as opposed to the current constitutional monarchy, in which the head of state is the Thai King, currently Bhumibol…
