Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

Could you pass Eco 100?

My best friend's son is taking Eco 100. While studying for his midterm exam, he encountered this question: 

True or false: There is no difference between these two equilibrium equations in Eco 100 consumer theory as one equation can be transformed mathematically into the other (a) MUx/MUy=Px/Py (b) MUx/Px=MUy/Py.

What do you think? Is this statement true or false? Please vote here (only the first 200 answers will be recorded.) 

Friedrich List: The Un-Adam Smith

Here is something a little different.  My history of economic thought course has just finished up with John Stuart Mill and I will be moving into the socialist reaction to classical economic theory.  Most of us probably associate Marx and socialism with criticism of the classical school but there was also an early non-socialist reaction in the work of Friedrich List (1789-1846).   While the Classical School laid out a model of how the world should work, a German by the name of Friedrich List presented the world as it often worked when it came to economic policy, particularly commercial policy.

Visions for Universities

My friend and PhD Thesis advisor Peter George was awarded the David C. Smith Award for Significant Contribution to Scholarship and Policy on Higher Education in Canada at a dinner on October 13^th hosted by the Council of Universities.  As part of the celebration, Peter George delivered a speech that drew upon his three-term experience as President of McMaster to reflect and comment on the state and future of university education.  He noted that during the recent provincial election in Ontario, he did not see a vision for higher education articulated by any of the parties and yet he believes that this is what is needed the most. 

Revisiting the Sustainability of Post-Secondary Education

I decided to try and dig a little deeper on the issue of the sustainability of post-secondary education spending in Canada by looking at the numbers in real per capita terms and by province.   As I mentioned in my earlier post, while fiscal sustainability is a term generally used in the health care policy debate, it can  be applied to government programs in general as well as post-secondary education in particular.   If real per capita government spending is rising faster than GDP then one may argue that there is a potential long-term sustainability problem. Of course, it can also reveal that there is simply a very strong preference for the particular expenditure category in question if it is rising faster than GDP.

I've decided to focus on only one province to keep things fairly simple.  An examination of the Statistics Canada data on post-secondary education spending for Ontario reveals some interesting trends. 

Sustainable Universities

Judging from some of the ruminating going on in the media lately, it would appear that Canadian universities will soon be facing a new assault under the mantra of sustainability.  Some of this is a spillover from the United States where rising tuition fees have exceeded the general inflation rate fostering a view that higher education in the United States is another “bubble” waiting to burst and that once it does universities will be forced to close programs.  Canada is not the United States, but the discussion here can be summarized by Tuesday’s editorial in the Globe and Mail “Reform or Perish” which among other things states:

Hysteresis in the teaching of econometrics

When I was a graduate student - some 25 years ago - there was a practical reason for why Bayesian methods played little or no role in the textbooks.  Even though classical methods asked the wrong questions* and forced people to wade through a myriad of complicated and contradictory ways of answering them, it was at least possible to extract point estimates from the data. A practitioner who wanted to address problems more complicated than the linear normal regression model would find that Bayesian methods had very little to offer in the way of concrete advice, so she could be forgiven for concluding that spending time on them was pretty much pointless.

A Lament for Public Policy

In New Directions for Intelligent Government in Canada: Papers in Honour of Ian Stewart, Don Drummond reflects on the state of public policy analysis in Canada and whether the rigour of policy analysis that existed in the past still exists today though he wisely cautions that “tales of the good old days are often the product of bad memories.”   He comments particularly on the state of economic public policy analysis at the various sources: the local, provincial, and federal government levels as well as universities, think tanks, the private sector and the media and composes what could be termed a Canadian lament for economic public policy analysis. 

Why have double rooms in residence?

One of the little known differences between Canada and the U.K. is the design of university residence rooms.

Rooms in British university residences are usually singles.

Canadian universities typically have a mix, including a good number of double rooms, with the percentage of doubles varying from campus to campus.

Students, typically, prefer singles to doubles. So why have double rooms in residence?

British Tuition Hikes: A Canadian Opportunity?

Last Thursday, about 300,000 British secondary school students (England, Wales & Northern Ireland) received their A-level results, which are a key determinant of whether or not they will receive a place at a university of their choice.  This year, the number of applicants to British universities was about 684,000 but the number of spaces was 480,000. 

An academic integrity policy for faculty?

Carleton University has a 14 page academic integrity policy governing student conduct. It describes in detail the various types of unacceptable behaviour, the process for investigating allegations of misconduct, and the various consequences a student might face.

There is no parallel policy for faculty.

Perhaps that's because no such policy is necessary. After all, faculty don't violate the principles of academic integrity, do they?

Thinking About Economics

As part of my fall teaching load, I will be teaching what economists sometimes refer to as “History of Thought” but which is more correctly termed the “History of Economic Thought” or perhaps “Evolution of Economic Theory and Analysis”. 

The Economic Journal of Negative Research Findings

There are inevitably times in the career of any academic when an original hypothesis is not supported by subsequent research findings. In the past this has often meant that such findings went unpublished and did not therefore contribute either to personal advancement or departmental research rankings. All that has now changed. The European Journal of Negative Research Findings positively welcomes research papers which are unable to reach any conclusion whatsoever... Laurie Taylor Guide to Higher Education

Republican profs give out less egalitarian grades. So what?

A number of bloggers (for example Mark Perry, Catherine Rampell, Greg Mankiw)  have picked up Bar and Zussman's recent paper on Partisan Grading. (Downloadable here, forthcoming here)

Bar and Zussman take data on student grades, student SAT scores, and professor political affiliation, and find that:

...student grades are linked to the political orientation of professors: relative to their Democratic colleagues, Republican professors are associated with a less egalitarian distribution of grades and with lower grades

Adverse selection and single-blind peer review

The American Economics Association has announced that, as of July 1, 2011, its journals will be moving from double-blind to single-blind peer review. The identity of a paper's author will now be revealed to any potential referees. The Association gives three reasons for its decision: 

1. "Easy access to search engines increasingly limits the effectiveness of the double-blind process in maintaining anonymity". 
2. It "increases the administrative cost of the journals" 
3. It makes it "harder for referees to identify an author's potential conflicts of interest arising, for example, from consulting".

What do you think of the American Economic Association's decision to end double-blind peer review?

The American Economic Association's decision to switch from double-blind to single-blind reviewing has attracted much attention, for example:

http://crookedtimber.org/2011/06/05/should-the-american-economic-review-drop-double-anonymous-review/

http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/leading-economics-journals-drop-double-blind-peer-review/33462

The mathematics generation gap

Here's my theory: Some students struggle with economics because they do not fully understand the mathematical tools economists use. Profs do not know how their students were taught mathematics, what their students know, what their students don't know - and have no idea how to help their students bridge those gaps.

Should economists be licensed?

In the US, as in most other OECD countries, unionization rates have been falling for decades. Yet this decline has been counter-balanced by a rise in professional licensing. This picture, taken from Kleiner and Krueger (ht Thomas Lemieux), says it all:

Are gifted education programs a waste of money?

In my latest Globe and Mail piece, I summarized a study by Sa Bui, Steven G. Craig, and Scott Imberman on the effectiveness of gifted education. The authors look at students in a large urban American school district who were evaluated for gifted programming in grade five. They ask: Who does better on the grade 6 and 7 standardized tests, the students who just made it into the gifted program, or the ones who fell just below the gifted threshold? 

What's the best way to scale grades?

It happens. An exam question is not clear, or more challenging than intended. The exam is marked by an over-zealous TA. Or perhaps the students haven't studied as hard as they should have.

As a result, the students' grades are, in some sense, too low - they do not accurately convey the students' level of ability or understanding of the material, or are lower than grades given to comparable students with similar levels of knowledge elsewhere in the university.

So the professor scales the grades.

But there are at least three ways of scaling grades, each one of which has different distributional implications.

Don't eat the marshmallow

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery" - Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield"

Canadians are increasingly indebted. 31% of us struggle to make our bills and payments. We're pretty clueless when it comes to retirement - just 40% have a good idea how money we need to save in order to maintain our standard of living in retirement. 

This state of affairs worried the Harper government enough to prompt the creation of a Task Force on Financial Literacy.  The numbers above are taken from their report.

I regard the the whole financial literacy exercise with some cynicism. As Canada has reasonably adequate government-funded income support programs for seniors, governments have a strong interest in ensuring that Canadians have enough savings that they do not need to rely upon those supports.