Posts from — January 2007

Plagiarism is defined by the University [pg. 1] as

the appropriation of another’s idea, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credit.

The sanctions for this are severe. Make sure all your work can’t be thought of as plagiarized by first referencing your work properly, the University has a tutorial here.

Second, if you really want to be sure, try submitting your essay or other work to turnitin.com. This is a service provided by the University for faculty and students to guard against plagiarism.

Finally, here is a .pdf of the entire policy.
[Dowlonad UL_Research_Misconduct_Policy.pdf]

[via]

“It has long been known” . . .
[I didn't look up the original reference.]

“A definite trend is evident” . . .
[These data are practically meaningless.]

“Of great theoretical and practical importance” . . .
[Interesting to me.]

“While it has not been possible to provide definite answers to these questions” . . .
[An unsuccessful experiment but I still have to get it published.]

“Three of the samples were chosen for detailed study” . . .
[The results of the others didn't make any sense.]

“Typical results are shown” . . .
[The best results are shown.]

“These results will be shown in a subsequent report” . . .
[I might get around to this sometime if I'm pushed.]

“The most reliable results are those obtained by Jones” . . .
[He was my graduate assistant.]

“It is believed that” . . .
[I think]

“It is generally believed that” . . .
[A couple of other guys think so, too.]

“It is clear that much additional work will be required before a complete understanding occurs” . . .
[I don't understand it.]

“Correct within an order of magnitude” . . .
[Wrong]

“It is hoped that this study will stimulate further investigations in this field” . . .
[This is a lousy paper, but so are all the others on this miserable topic.]

“Thanks are due to Joe Blotz for assistance with the experiment and to George Frink for valuable assistance” . . .
[Blotz did the work and Frink explained to me what it meant.]

“A careful analysis of obtainable data” . . .
[Three pages of notes were obliterated when I knocked over a glass of beer.]

• Economist’s View: Bruce Bartlett and Tyler Cowen on Inequality
  Excellent summary of respective positions on inequality, useful for Macro Class
  (tags: Ul Macro Readings)
• The Gapminder World 2006, beta
  :ecture 2 MDU
  (tags: Data economics Design Google inequality politics tools web Reference)
• World Health Charts
  Here’s a Good resource for a Health Economics Course
  (tags: Health Reference)
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01676296
  Journal of Health Economics
  (tags: Health)
• Health Economics
  Leading Health Economics Journal
  (tags: Health Journals)

• Cornell Notetaking Method Custom PDF Generator
  Really useful notetaking method; UL undergrads should take a look at the Cornell Method. These guys give you templates to print out and use in class.
  (tags: books design education free imported list productivity notetaking notes pdf tools gtd)
• http://www.econ.vu.nl/econometriclinks/rankings/eerjournalsranking2002.html
  Economic Journals Ranking by Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, Stengos. (Journal of the European Economic Association, 2003)
  (tags: Journals Rankings)
• University of Limerick Teaching and Learning Website
  Extremely Good Resource for UL profs.
  (tags: UL)
• Decision Making Tools and Techniques - ProModel
  Simulation Software
  (tags: simulation)
• Discrete Event Simulation
  Open Courseware for Simulations at Berkely
  (tags: simulation)
• Winter Simulation Conference
  Top simulation conference in world
  (tags: simulation)
• OpenConf Conference Management Peer-Review Software System & Service
  Really useful software platform, will come in handy for Health Economics conference
  (tags: Health Conference)
• Handbook of Economic Growth Chapters
  Great Resource for Macro
  (tags: Readings)
• Word Templates and Cornell Note Taking - Productivity Portfolio
  Here’s an MS Word template of the Cornell Note Format for people who take notes on their laptops.
  (tags: notetaking howto template cornell notes gtd word productivity paper)

• Inside the Economist’s Mind (I.T.E.M.): Review in Ireland
  Link to my review of Inside the Economist’s Mind from Dr. Barnett’s website.
  (tags: UL Writing Weblogs interestingpeople)
• Handout: Adam Smith on the Division of Labor
  (tags: reading Intl+Monetary+ecs)
• Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: Handout: U.S. International Trade and Scale Variables
  Good Handount for International Monetary Economics
  (tags: Readings, Intl+Monetary+ecs)

• LaTeX project: LaTeX documentation
  Learning LaTeX Resources
  (tags: documentation opensource programming tex tutorial writing)

Here are my student evaluations for Autumn 2006/2007

EC3601 Irish Economic Environment
[Download EC3601_Evaulations_Kinsella.pdf]

EC4333 Economics of European Integration
[Download_EC4333_Kinsella_Evaluation.pdf]

EC6101 International Political Economy
[Download EC6101_Kinsella_Evaluation.pdf]

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the evaluations, as they have shown that most people like the way I’m doing things. There are areas to improve though, and three things are apparent from the qualitative comments:

1. He asks too much of us;
2. He tries to put too much into a lecture and so seems scattered;
3. He knows his stuff and is enthusiastic but tends to wander off the point sometimes.

So next semester, I’m going to focus on being focused in lectures, more structured in my objectives for the class in particular and the module in general, and demand less of the student in terms of continual assessment.

Feedback is great. Not fun, but good for you in the long run.

Prospects for Monetary Union After the Euro
Edited by Paul De Grauwe and Jacques Melitz
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006, pp. 336 \$45.00/£29.95 (Cloth).
ISBN 0-262-04230-4

928 words.
To appear in the Review of Political Economy.
—
The Euro is a fait accompli, and modern monetary and international economics must take account of the new status quo. Prospects for Monetary Union after the Euro collects the proceedings of a 2003 conference aimed at answering the following three questions: First, given the Euro’s existence, what is the opinion of the profession about monetary unions in general? Second, In the case of enlargement of the European Union (EU), what are the consequences for accession countries of adopting the Euro? Third, how does the existence of the Euro affect the running of Eurozone labour and financial markets?

There are 11 chapters following the usual brief introduction by the editors. The first five chapters concentrate on the effects of enlargement on the Eurozone. The sixth chapter spends its time asking what benefits the United Kingdom gained from the Euro’s introduction. Chapter seven uses panel data to estimate the effects of EMU on member state’s bilateral trade. The rest of the book concentrates on modelling asymmetric shocks in governmental insurance markets and outright dollarisation versus regional monetary union in South America and East Asia. The final chapter contains a detailed analysis of monetary unions that have failed.

The dominant modeling methodologies throughout are, in order of frequency: panel dataset econometrics (Chapters 4, 7, 8, 11 and 12),  Real Business Cycle theory (Chapters 2 and 9) and dynamic game theory (Chapters 3 and 5).

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 ask simple questions of the enlargement process, considering simulations of likely convergence paths for accession countries in a Real Business Cycle framework (Chapter 1), an estimation of costs of structural reforms in an accession country (Chapter 2), finding out how intra-EU trade will be affected by the presence of possibly more favourable conditions in newer countries (Chapter 3) and the influence of productivity differentials on the exchange rates of four accession countries. The rest of the chapters are focused on interesting and topical questions relating to the adoption of a currency. Particularly interesting are Chapters 11 and 12. Chapter 11 asks a fascinating question: what are the prospects for a pan-Asian currency union which includes China, Japan, and Korea? The authors concludes quite reasonably that a preferential trading agreement is very likely, given the recent moves by China and Korea to normalise their trading relationships. Chapter 12 asks what happens when currency areas die. Nitch takes the view that a large number of macroeconomic variables must be brought to bear on the problem of currency area dissolution, and constructs a massive model where it would be very difficult to see the wood for the trees, but for Nitch’s skill of exposition.

While the papers are technical and largely data driven, the exposition and presentation is of high quality, and the editors are to be commended for the focus they place on analytical and empirical analyses from a unified methodological standpoint. There does seem to be a lack of a  political economy viewpoint in the volume. The EU is an economic solution to a political problem, but the problems that created the present EU persist, so why can’t we view the accession countries through the lens of political economy? As an example, the inclusion or exclusion of Turkey into the EU will have to be considered in a political economy framework before standard RBC models can be force-fitted onto some large panel dataset and estimated to oblivion, if we are to gain some insight into how these systems behave when coupled through a common currency.

Given the well documented political struggles that took place to move the Euro from an idea to a reality, might have drawn some consideration from one of the authors. Most of the volume is concerned with the possible effects of enlargement, and so the book’s theme is largely topical. Also, the book lacks a truly dynamic modeling approach given by discrete dynamical systems and simulation, which would have been ideal for the questions asked in Chapters 11 and 12, for example. Given DeGrauwe’s expertise in the area of chaotic and nonlinear dynamical systems, it is a pity this work wasn’t carried out.

There is a nice speculative look at an Asian currency union and the costs and benefits of full dollarisation, even if the analytical lens is panel data estimation only. A very careful data analysis with overtones of political economy is carried out in chapter 12, based mainly on Glick and Rose’s 2002 dataset. Chapters 11 and 12 are, in my opinion, the best chapters in the book, though Chapter 9, pgs. 228 and 229 provides an extremely good summary of the recent literature on the costs of partial and full dollarisation, which taught me a lot about the area in a short space of time.

The chief contribution of the book to the debate is the quantification of gains and diversionary elements to trade liberalisation and market integration from the further enlargement of the European Union. When the dust settles on the European project, I’m sure this book will be seen as a milestone in academic thinking on the subject.

References

Glick, R., and Rose, A.K. (2002) Does a currency union affect trade? The time series evidence. European Economic Review, 46 (June): 1125–51. (Link to the 2001 working paper.)

—

Every UL student needs to learn how to reference properly and effectively. Use this UL Library resource as a guide to creating proper references.

Here is a .pdf on the subject from Curtin University as well for handy reference.

[Download Handout 1]

Here is a handy piece of free, cross-platform software called Jabref to help you keep track of your references.

Don’t say I never gave ya nothin’.

• Printing from a Windows XP PC to a printer attached to an Airport Extreme Base Station or Airport Express
  (tags: apple howto mac osx software tutorial tutorials wifi windows airport printer)

Right Click the link below to download the course outline. Course pack coming soon.

[Download_Kinsella_EC6012_CourseOutline.pdf]

1  Overview

Macroeconomics is the study of how the decisions of individuals, families, firms and governments produce outcomes, such as economic progress or stagnation, inflation or unemployment, for the economy as a whole. This course is about understanding macroeconomics in the context of the questions the discipline asks itself: how can we understand inequality in society? What does it mean for an economy to ‘grow’? Is such growth sustainable? This course will equip students with a framework for asking these questions.

1.1  Lecturer Details

I’m in AM068a, my number is 061 233611. Office hours are 12-1 Tuesdays or by appointment. Email me at stephen.kinsella@ul.ie if you wish to make an appointment.

2  Lecture Outline & Course Textbook

Lectures run from 21 Feb to 2 May. All lectures will be in room S116 in the Schumann building. They are 2 hours long and participatory. Slides used during the lectures and links mentioned will be provided during the lectures and online at http://www.stephenkinsella.net. All readings will be taken from Samuel Bowles, Richard Edwards, and Frank Roosevelt, Understanding Capitalism: Command, Competition, and Change, Oxford University Press, 2005. Here is a link to the OUP site for the book: http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780195138658.

Here are some notes from Inside the Economist’s Mind, Conversations with Eminent Economists edited by Paul A. Samuelson and William A. Barnett.

Overview

This is a collection of interviews commissioned for a journal, Macroeconomic Dynamics. The idea is to gauge the position of the profession by asking the people who invented large swathes of the theory their motivations for doings what they did, when they did it, and how they did it. Readers find eccentric and irascible characters behind some of the major innovations in economic science. I loved this book, and read it cover to cover in a day.

The book purports (pg. xi) to “contain[] unique insights into the thinking of some of the world’s most important economists, whose work contributed to the evolution of modern economic thought”, and does.

Scientific biography is a passion of mine, ever since reading Richard Feynman’s writings on his life and work. Looking at the path integral method as an undergraduate, you can see how he came up with it (if, in fairness, I didn’t really understand it), how startlingly original he was in doing his physics, because that’s how he lived his life—he followed different paths as he felt he needed to, and arrived at different destinations that others because of his personality.

So it’s great that William Barnett, the editor of Macroeconomic Dynamics, and the co-editor of this book, decided to ask these men these questions.

I’ll add to this post as I get time to make the notes I want to keep for my reference.
Chapter 7, An interview with Paul A. Samuelson, pp. 143–165

Samuelson is the big one. Arguably the best economist of his generation and certainly the mst highly lauded, his contributions have gone across the board of modern economics. Loads of information on him in his own words is here, as well as a nice long rant at Milton Friedman at the start of the interview.

Cool quotes from the chapter:

Firstly, he seems to reject the metaphor made by Phillip Mirowski in his book More Heat than Light that economics is a social physics that Samuelson helped bring into the world. We find Samuelson refuting his interviewer’s assertion that he had become highly influenced by the work of physical scientists (pg. 157-158, emphasis in original):

…I would be stupid, if out of “physics envy” or snake-oil salesmanship, I would inject into economic theory analytical mathematics that fit only gases and liquids. In my writings, I have criticised wrong analogies to physics by Irving Fisher (whom I admire as a superlative American Theorist). Even the genius of von Neumann has not escaped my critical auditings.  I have given on qualified approval to Marshall hope for a more biological and less physical approach to future economics….Maybe someday, future Phillip Mirowskis and Roy Weintraubs will better fine-tune their nuances.

Next we find Samuelson’s hope for a truly successful grand theory of economics is rooted in its need to explain the emergence of economic history (pg. 163–164):

“My notion of a fruitful economic science would be that it can help us explain and understand the course of actual economic history. A scholar who seriously addresses commentary on contemporary monthly and yearly events is, in this view, practicing the study of history—history in its most contemporary time phasing.”

Chapter 1 Wassily Leontief, interviewed by Duncan Foley

pg. 18 “My feeling is that the fundamental theoretical understand of economic fluctuations is a dynamic process. I still believe, what explains the fluctuations of economies is some kind of difference, differential equations. Of course, structural change is very important, its important, particularly now. It’s always dynamic. It’s a system of interrelationships, a system of equations, but still the quantitative approach is important. ”

pg. 20 “As I explained in my Presidential Address, If you really want to understand an empirical science, you must have the facts”

His Nobel lecture, ‘Structure of the World Economy’ is here.

Leontief on Keynes [pg. 21]:

…Keynes was very pragmatically oriented. In spirit, he was very much a politician, an excellent politician. I think he developed his theory essentially as a way to support his policy advice. He was incredibly intelligent.

On the relationship between theoretical and empirical economics [pg. 23]:

” I am essentially a theorist. But I felt very strongly that theory is just construction of frameworks to understand how real systems work. It is an organising principle, while for many economists theory is a separate subject.”

On gathering data for economic prediction (pg. 29):

To exploit the influence of technological change on economic change, you just can’t compute some supply curve; you must really have a mass of information. I wrote up how it can be done, and I nearly succeeded in getting some money to do it. My feeling is one could even do some anticipation, prediction, if one had really detailed data….I think this is the future of the work, in the interaction between economics, engineering, science, and the substructure of production.

On economists  and the economic profession (pg. 31):

….economists are just a particular type of management,…

Chapter 4 An interview with Franco Modigliani

pg. 91 “I am revising [the famous 1944 Liquidity Preference paper] and starting from an approach which I think is much more useful. I am starting from the notion that both the classics and Keynes take their departure from the classical demand for money model, which is one of the oldest and best established paradigms in economics. The demand for money is proportional to the value of transactions, which at any point can be approximated as proportional to nominal income (real income multiplied by the price level). The nominal money supply is exogenous. Therefore, the money market must reach an equilibrium through changes. Nominal income is the variable that clears the market.

Where then is the difference between classical and Keynesian economics? Simple: The classics assumed that wages were highly flexible and output fixed by full employment (clearing of the labor market). Thus the quantity of money had no effect on output but merely determined the price level, which was proportional to the nominal money supply (the quantity theory of money). One the other hand, Keynes relied on the realistic assumption that wages are rigid (downward). That is, they do not promptly decline in response to an excess supply of labor. Workers do not slash their nominal wage demands, and firms do not slash their wage offers, when unemployment exceeds the frictional level. What, then, clears the money market? Again, it is a decline in nominal income. But since prices are basically fixed, the decline must occur in real income and particularly in employment. When there is insufficient nominal money supply to satisfy the full employment demand for money, the market is cleared through a decline in output and employment. As Keynes said, the fundamental issue is that prices are not flexible.”

Modigliani on the foundations of macro;

(pg. 91) “Macroeconomics, or the mechanisms through which money supply determines output (employment), stands on hour basic pillars: 1. liquidity preference, 2. the investment function, 3. the consumption or saving function, and 4 the equality of saving or investment (properly generalized for the role of government and the rest of the world)”

In future editions of this book and the further volumes to come, I’d love to see a focus on the characters behind different approaches to economics and their reasons for taking contrarian positions to the mainstream—Foley, Nell, Solow and Velupillai (my thesis advisor, in full disclosure), as well as more traditional mainstays of the profession. A focus on economists regarded primariy as great teachers would be great as well, not just the theoretical giants.

The book is a very rare thing—an economic page-turner, like The Worldly Philosopher, Adam’s Fallacy, and Freakonomics. The personalities behind the science’s blleding edge make for compelling reading.

• Health Economics Association of Ireland
  Conference
  (tags: Health Conference)
• IJMS | Irish Journal of Medical Sciences
  (tags: Health Journals)

I’m delighted to be advising promising undergraduates, and here are a few things I’ll try to stick to so you get the most out of the experience.

Appointments

Always make an appointment. This is not because I am busy and important, but because your project is important, and it deserves my undivided attention.

Minutes

At our meetings, as we talk, I’ll keep a record of what we talk about in a text file—what we decide to do, what I advise you to read, where you should be looking for data, and so forth. This will be emailed to you as minutes of the meeting. These minutes are the record of your FYP.

Actions

With everything we decide, when a concrete action comes up (”Complete a detailed outline”, “Write a 5 page lit review”, etc), we’ll set a deadline for completing that action. The deadlines you and I set in there are yours to own. When you say you’ll meet a deadline, I expect you to meet it. If for some reason you have to change it, email me and set a new one. It’s your project, so you own it. Don’t expect me to hound you to get the thing in on time. If you’ve a problem meeting deadlines like this, I suggest you read this book or look at this website. Both are well worth your time.

Turnaround Policy

When you’re working on a draft and you send it to me, expect a 7-10 day turnaround from the day you send it to me until you get it back. Normally I’ll be much faster than this, but sometimes I won’t. I have other things to do and sometimes they’re going to be a higher priority than you. After 10 days, feel free to send me a bitchy email. What the 7-10 day turnaround means is: if you’re handing in your first draft of your FYP one week before the official UL deadline, having broken all of the previous deadlines you set yourself without talking to me about it, you’re not going to find me breaking my back to help you—I’ll generally only go through a one draft iteration with you in that case. But don’t let that happen to you. Stick to the deadlines, and we can get some interesting work done together.

Finally, enjoy the experience of putting a piece of original research together. There are loads of good topics to work on, and I’m sure something will interest you. For a list of potential FY P titles, email me.

Here’s a sample proposal form to guide students I’m advising for their Final Year Projects.

[Download Final_Year_Project_Guidelines.rtf]

Responding to a student query:

1. The use of bilingual dictionaries is allowed, as long as long as they are clean copies, so nothing is written by you on them. This is at the lecturer’s discretion, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t have these dictionaries if you wish to use them.

2. The total continual assessment will still be 30% as stated in the course outline. I will take your best 2 problem set marks and the essay as the basis for the 30% mark.

3. If you have technical questions, I do have office hours from 11-12 on Friday.

• A Production and Cost Experiment for Use in the Principles of Microeconomics
  Maybe useful for introducing concept of production function to noneconomists
  (tags: MD Health Teaching)
• Expernomics Fall 2000
  Excellent game to teach Marginal Utility to MDs
  (tags: Teaching MD)
• Health, Nutrition & Population
  Excellent MD Health Econ Website
  (tags: MD Health Teaching Research)

• development models - lewis
  Transferring surplus labour from rural to urban areas has no effect on agricultural productivity as MP
  (tags: paper)