Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Economic measurement, empirical economics, evidence-based economics -- call it what you want, but lately it's been trouncing the competition. The table below, which speaks for itself, is from Bentley MacLeod's interesting new paper, "The Human Capital Approach to Inference" (more on it in a later post). One can only wonder how its 2023 row will look. (What a tectonic shift from the 70's and 80's. I was a grad student in the 80's, when all the big profs were theorists and all the big students were aspiring theorists...)

Monday, March 28, 2016

Central Bank Forecast Accuracy

[Sorry for being AWOL. Like everyone else, I'm generally three feet underwater and breathing through a straw, but in March and April it seems that even the straw goes under. Anyway, lots of stuff in the pipeline, so let's try to get going again.]

Rummaging around in the basement I just found this Bloomberg piece on comparative central bank forecasting performance. A friend emailed it a little more than six months ago (ouch), but it's still interesting. Maybe you missed it.

Bloomberg's first-ever ranking of central bank forecasting, which is relied on by business and finance, turns up winners and losersBloomberg's first-ever ranking of central bank forecasting, which is relied on by business and finance, turns up winners and losers

Friday, March 11, 2016

Miserable Teaching Evaluations

I have always disliked teaching evaluations, feeling that they fail to measure true teaching effectiveness. And it's not just sour grapes -- really, I swear, I generally do fine and have won several teaching awards. Rather, I simply think that teaching evaluations create bad incentives. Ask yourself: Is the behavior that maximizes teaching evaluations the same behavior that maximizes true teaching effectiveness? No way.

But it may be much worse than that. Check out the abstract below for a seminar to be presented in Penn Statistics next week by Philip Stark, a Berkeley statistician (and Associate Dean of the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences). Paper here.

TEACHING EVALUATIONS (MOSTLY) DO NOT MEASURE TEACHING EFFECTIVENESS

PHILIP STARK - UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

Joint work with Anne Boring (SciencesPo) and Kellie Ottoboni (UC Berkeley)

Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are widely used in academic personnel decisions as a measure of teaching effectiveness. We show:

· SET are biased against female instructors by an amount that is large and statistically significant

· the bias affects how students rate even putatively objective aspects of teaching, such as how promptly assignments are graded

· the bias varies by discipline and by student gender, among other things

· it is not possible to adjust for the bias, because it depends on so many factors

· SET are more sensitive to students' gender bias and grade expectations than they are to teaching effectiveness

· gender biases can be large enough to cause more effective instructors to get lower SET than less effective instructors.

These findings are based on permutation tests applied to two datasets: 23,001 SET of 379 instructors by 4,423 students in six mandatory first-year courses in a five-year natural experiment at a French university, and 43 SET for four sections of an online course in a randomized, controlled, blind experiment at a US university.

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Georgetown Center for Econometric Practice

Check out the Georgetown Center for Econometric Practice (GCEP). Web page here. Facebook page here. Screenshot below.

GEORGETOWN CENTER FOR ECONOMETRIC PRACTICE (GCEP)

CONTACT GCEP

Georgetown Center for Econometric Practice
Tel: +1 202 687 6172
gcep@georgetown.edu

GCEP PARTNERS

CEMMAP
IZA

GCEP TRAINING COURSES

Our training courses are designed to be of particular benefit to economists and social scientists in the public and private sectors wanting to know how to use econometric methods and a variety of data to inform policy making.

They run over 1 or 2 days in the new facilities of Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies located in downtown Washington, D.C. at 640 Massachusets Avenue N.W.