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description= 15 posts published by Lars Syll during June 2014;
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statistical conclusions how do we calibrate the uncertainty introduced by data collection nowadays this question has become quite salient and it is routinely answered using wellknown methods of statistical inference with standard errors t tests and p values these conventional answers however turn out to depend critically on certain rather restrictive assumptions for instance random sampling thus investigators who use conventional statistical technique turn out to be making explicitly or implicitly quite restrictive behavioral assumptions about their data collection process more typically perhaps the data in hand are simply the data most readily available the moment that conventional statistical inferences are made from convenience samples substantive assumptions are made about how the social world operates when applied to convenience samples the random sampling assumption is not a mere technicality or a minor revision on the periphery the assumption becomes an integral part of the theory in particular regression and its elaborations are now standard tools of the trade although rarely discussed statistical assumptions have major impacts on analytic results obtained by such methods consider the usual textbook exposition of least squares regression we have n observational units indexed by i 1 n there is a response variable yi conceptualized as μi i where μi is the theoretical mean of yi while the disturbances or errors i represent the impact of random variation sometimes of omitted variables the errors are assumed to be drawn independently from a common gaussian distribution with mean 0 and finite variance generally the error distribution is not empirically identifiable outside the model so it cannot be studied directly even in principle without the model the error distribution is an imaginary population and the errors i are treated as if they were a random sample from this imaginary population a research strategy whose frailty was discussed earlier usually explanatory variables are introduced and μi is hypothesized to be a linear combination of such variables the assumptions about the μi and i are seldom justified or even made explicit although minor correlations in the i can create major bias in estimated standard errors for coefficients why do μi and i behave as assumed to answer this question investigators would have to consider much more closely than is commonly done the connection between social processes and statistical assumptions we have tried to demonstrate that statistical inference with convenience samples is a risky business while there are better and worse ways to proceed with the data at hand real progress depends on deeper understanding of the data generation mechanism in practice statistical issues and substantive issues overlap no amount of statistical maneuvering will get very far without some understanding of how the data were produced more generally we are highly suspicious of efforts to develop empirical generalizations from any single dataset rather than ask what would happen in principle if the study were repeated it makes sense to actually repeat the study indeed it is probably impossible to predict the changes attendant on replication without doing replications similarly it may be impossible to predict changes resulting from interventions without actually intervening share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky one woman seventeen british accents 21 jun 2014 at 11 57 posted in varia 1 comment impressive piketty s second fundamental law of capitalism 20 jun 2014 at 10 43 posted in economics 4 comments when piketty introduces this law in the text of capital in the twenty first century he abbreviates it in the form β s g for the benefit of the general reader but he then follows up that introductory statement with several pages of explanatory text and warnings to the reader that make it clear that that his intent is only to describe the value toward which β would converge in the long run if s and g remain relatively constant unfortunately the abbreviated statement of the law has thrown many people off economists are in the habit of using equilibrium methods to turn long term asymptotic limits of processes that evolve over time into unchanging constraints on some idealized steady state equilibrium so rather than use the inherently dynamic accounts of wealth income and the capital to income ratio that are partially explained above and that piketty uses to study the dynamical evolution of the structure of economic inequality as it evolves over time some commentators have instead gone right to a steady state model in which β is set constantly equal to s g and from which they then fallaciously deduce immediate and absurd changes in β from the fluctuations in s and g this is quite far from piketty s intent and misrepresents his framework since part of the point of the second fundamental law and its surrounding framework is to analyze what happens as the capital to income ratio increases over time not what happens in the less usual conditions when it is stable the focus on steady state conditions seems to me misguided for example if a society begins in 2014 with a capital to income ratio of 4 a savings rate of 10 and a growth rate of 1 5 then even if the savings rate and growth rate remained constant indefinitely it would take a very long time for β to get near its limiting value of s g 6 7 specifically β would not get to within 10 of s g until the year 2115 it would not get to within 5 of s g until the year 2159 and it would not get to within 1 of s g until the year 2159 the distance between the present value of β and the present value of s g is a measure of the present strength of the force pushing the capital to income ratio higher since some of the forces generating inequality depend on the rapidity with which β is increasing it is the strength of this force and the direction in which β is moving that are important piketty s fundamental law should not be interpreted as the statement that β is approximately equal to s g under ordinary conditions β can be quite far from s g that s part of the point dan kervick skidelsky on the need for an economics curriculum reform 19 jun 2014 at 10 03 posted in economics 2 comments in a manifesto published in april economics students at the university of manchester advocated an approach that begins with economic phenomena and then gives students a toolkit to evaluate how well different perspectives can explain it rather than with mathematical models based on unreal assumptions the manchester students argue that the mainstream within the discipline neoclassical theory has excluded all dissenting opinion and the crisis is arguably the ultimate price of this exclusion today s post crash students are right so what is keeping the mainstream s intellectual apparatus going for starters economics teaching and research is deeply embedded in an institutional structure that as with any ideological movement rewards orthodoxy and penalizes heresy the great classics of economics from smith to ricardo to veblen go untaught research funding is allocated on the basis of publication in academic journals that espouse the neoclassical perspective publication in such journals is also the basis of promotion for now the best that curriculum reform can do is to remind students that economics is not a science like physics and that it has a much richer history than is to be found in the standard textbooks indeed mainstream economics is a pitifully thin distillation of historical wisdom on the topics that it addresses it should be applied to whatever practical problems it can solve but its tools and assumptions should always be in creative tension with other beliefs concerning human wellbeing and flourishing what students are taught today certainly does not deserve its imperial status in social thought robert skidelsky share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky ricardian equivalence total horseshit 18 jun 2014 at 08 32 posted in economics 13 comments ricardian equivalence basically means that financing government expenditures through taxes or debts is equivalent since debt financing must be repaid with interest and agents equipped with rational expectations would only increase savings in order to be able to pay the higher taxes in the future thus leaving total expenditures unchanged why in the standard neoclassical consumption model used in dsge macroeconomic modeling people are basically portrayed as treating time as a dichotomous phenomenon today and the future when contemplating making decisions and acting how much should one consume today and how much in the future facing an intertemporal budget constraint of the form c t c f 1 r f t y t y f 1 r where c t is consumption today c f is consumption in the future f t is holdings of financial assets today y t is labour incomes today y f is labour incomes in the future and r is the real interest rate and having a lifetime utility function of the form u u c t au c f where a is the time discounting parameter the representative agent consumer maximizes his utility when u c t a 1 r u c f this expression the euler equation implies that the representative agent consumer is indifferent between consuming one more unit today or instead consuming it tomorrow typically using a logarithmic function form u c log c which gives u c 1 c the euler equation can be rewritten as 1 c t a 1 r 1 c f or c f c t a 1 r this importantly implies that according to the neoclassical consumption model changes in the real interest rate and consumption move in the same direction and it also follows that consumption is invariant to the timing of taxes since wealth f t y t y f 1 r has to be interpreted as present discounted value net of taxes and so according to the assumption of ricardian equivalence the timing of taxes does not affect consumption simply because the maximization problem as specified in the model is unchanged that the theory doesn t fit the facts we already knew and yesterday on voxeu jonathan a parker summarized a series of studies empirically testing the theory reconfirming how out of line with reality is ricardian equivalence this only again underlines that there is of course no reason for us to believe in that fairy tale ricardo himself mirabile dictu didn t believe in ricardian equivalence in essay on the funding system 1820 he wrote but the people who paid the taxes never so estimate them and therefore do not manage their private affairs accordingly we are too apt to think that the war is burdensome only in proportion to what we are at the moment called to pay for it in taxes without reflecting on the probable duration of such taxes it would be difficult to convince a man possessed of 20 000 or any other sum that a perpetual payment of 50 per annum was equally burdensome with a single tax of 1000 and as one nobel laureate had it ricardian equivalence is taught in every graduate school in the country it is also sheer nonsense joseph e stiglitz twitter share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky so what 17 jun 2014 at 23 29 posted in varia comments off on so what imf warns of swedish housing bubble 17 jun 2014 at 09 19 posted in economics 3 comments a new imf report warns of rising financial instability and unsustainabe household indebtedness in sweden financial instability is an increasing concern house price increases have picked up again exceeding 71 2 percent annual growth for single family homes and 121 2 percent for tenant owned apartments in april household credit growth also remained strong pushing household indebtedness to almost 175 percent of disposable income in 2013 and over 190 percent if debt from tenant owned housing associations is included recent data indicate that household debt ratios are high across all income groups but particularly so for indebted lower income households who are especially vulnerable to income interest rate and house price shocks the aggregate net asset position of households is solid but a large share of assets is illiquid and has limited value as a buffer as a consequence a large and sudden drop in house prices would lower consumption employment and growth and ultimately impact the banking system the increase in house loans and house prices in sweden has for many years been among the steepest in the world sweden s house price boom started in mid 1990s and looking at the development of real house prices since 1986 there are reasons to be deeply worried source statistics sweden and own calculations the indebtedness of the swedish household sector has also risen to alarmingly high levels as can be seen in the figure below based on new data published earlier this month by statistics sweden showing the development of household debts disposable income 1990 2012 source statistics sweden and own calculations yours truly has been trying to argue for two years now with very serious people that it s really high time to take away the punch bowl mostly i have felt like the voice of one calling in the desert and up until now neither the swedish central bank nor the government has been willing to listen compairing the above figures with the one below source could perhaps give some refreshing perspective where do housing bubbles come from there are of course many different explanations but one of the fundamental mechanisms at work is that people expect house prices to increase which makes people willing to keep on buying houses at steadily increasing prices it s this kind of self generating cumulative process à la wicksell myrdal that is the core of the housing bubble unlike the usual commodities markets where demand curves usually point downwards on asset markets they often point upwards and therefore give rise to this kind of instability and the greater leverage the greater the increase in prices share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky elasticity of substitution a short refresher 16 jun 2014 at 16 05 posted in economics comments off on elasticity of substitution a short refresher thomas piketty argues in capital in the twenty first century that capital s share of income will probably continue to rise in the future in the neoclassical production and growth models that he refers to as capital goes on accumulating diminishing returns on capital isn t strong enough to stop net capital incomes from expanding in model terms this means that the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is greater than one since the reasoning may not be totally transparent to all interested this short video may be of some assistance next page recent posts stein s paradox a 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