Economics & Marginalia: June 30, 2023

Hi all,

I’m writing this one several thousand feet in the air as I return from my first-ever trip to DC (and indeed the US, as absurd as that sounds)—a flying visit of two days, packed with meeting and almost no time to see the city, so forgive me if this feels a) rushed, and b) tired; that will be because it really is both. My impressions, through a haze of jetlag (and indeed a haze of actual smog from across the border), were almost uniformly positive. Friendly, interesting people; good food; walkable; and if this was the worst time of year weather-wise, you don’t know how lucky you are. The only three drawbacks were the difficulty of finding good coffee in quantities smaller than the size of a swimming pool; the difficulty of finding a way to watch the Ashes when I woke up incredibly early; and the cost of good wine. Between all the novelty, all the meetings, and my absence last week I’ve got an absolutely enormous backlog of economics to get through, so right into it. The on-flight wifi seems to be down, so apologies in advance if the Friday links take a generous definition of Friday and wind-up in your inbox on Monday.

1. It’s incredibly hard to start with anything other than the blockbuster series of posts on Data Colada alleging that a series of papers by the Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino contained fraudulent data, juiced to ensure her studies provided interesting and publishable results (Gino has, apparently, been suspended by HBS following their own internal investigation). The first three parts of the four part series have been released, and they are all jaw-dropping: the alleged data tampering is incredibly crude, but effective. In one case, treatment values are reversed (for example, people who were in a treatment group are recoded to being in the control group); in another observations are moved from one cell to another in excel (a process that leaves a subtle digital trace that very few people know about—I certainly never did); in the most recent one, the relevant outcome variable has been manually altered for specific observations in order to create a strong, fascinating ‘finding’ that does not at all exist in what the Data Colada team think is the original data. Quite apart from the almost Coen Brothers-worthy lack of subtlety and prevalence of near-comical malfeasance in the whole sorry saga (one paper they discuss has evidence of two completely independent instances of fraud in the data, conducted by different people), the whole saga suggests that if even rather obvious fraud has taken so long to nose out, there must be much more sophisticated stuff that is being completely missed; academia is due a very long, very dark night of the soul to work out how to clean house, and develop institutions that are much more robust and less reliant on freelance investigation than those at present.
2. You can all replicate this one yourselves: my colleagues Susannah Hares and co-authors summarize the state of global education in nine rather beautiful charts.
3. The opening line of this Tim Harford blog (“Imagine a person whose desire for the easy life is stronger than their sense of ethics…”) makes it sound like it is going to be another piece on academic fraud, but instead it’s a much more thoughtful than average look at the effect of Chat GPT (and other technologies) on the ways we work, and how that varies across different kinds of worker (for my part, at least so far, Chat GPT has mainly been helpful in spotting and explaining the bugs in my LaTeX code; it’s teaching me to be a better, more consistent coder). He has more in this general theme here.
4. I liked this VoxDev piece which looks at the effect of Uganda’s progressive, inclusive policies on refugee inclusion (Uganda being host to an extremely large number of South Sudanese refugees) on both actual outcomes for Ugandans and their attitudes towards these arrivals. They find that social service provision for Ugandans increase with larger inflows of refugees (likely the effect of increased donor provision of support in areas where there are large numbers of arrivals); and that attitudes do not become more negative with more refugees, or with proximity to them. Yes, context matters; and the aid no doubt helps. But there is clearly no inevitable relationship between the presence of refugees, and accommodating policies to support them, and backlash against their presence.
5. I started this one really sceptical: Planet Money on the use of betting markets to try and help climate change sceptics form more accurate beliefs about the changes happening in the world right now. The premise is simple: give people money to bet on climate outcomes, and over time watch them as they adjust their initial beliefs to try and maximise their winnings (transcript). It’s a clever idea, though I haven’t quite let go of my reservations—is the policy implication to get everyone to enrol in betting markets?
6. The great labour economist Orley Ashenfelter has a podcast on the field, called The Work Goes On. The list of interviewees is incredibly impressive. I have yet to listen to / read the Solow transcript, but it’s next on my list.  
7. I missed this one when it came out, but when is it a bad time to celebrate completely ridiculous action movies? I’m on a plane right now, with John Wick 3 playing silently on the tiny TV screen in front of me (he’s in a library, so someone’s about to get hit with a book); it is, as Vice write here, completely criminal that there is no actual set of academy awards for stunts. John Woo’s entire career has missed out by this omission. They rectify the problem with their own list of nominees and winners, and it’s enormous fun from beginning to end. And, on that note…

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R