Graduate Economics Research Articles

Friedman in Louisiana

[Author Affiliation]William Breit, , , , The 2007 Southern Economic Association meetings take place near the first anniversary of Milton Friedman's death. Following an exchange with Jim Gwartney, who thought a tribute to Friedman was in order, I decided to finally take up the task of writing a memoir of the time I invited Milton Friedman to come to Louisiana State University (LSU) to present a lecture. It was during the election campaign of 1964 that pitted Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater. Friedman at the time was an unofficial adviser to Barry Goldwater and one of his strongest supporters.For those of you too young to remember who Barry Goldwater was and why Milton Friedman was a Goldwater fan, I feel it necessary to say a few words about Goldwater. He was a charismatic figure. Barry was the son of the founder of a department store in Phoenix called Goldwater's. After his father's death Barry transformed the family-owned store from middle-grade middle-class to an upscale equivalent of Neiman Marcus. Four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he joined the U.S. Air Force. He had a private pilot license and soon had his wings. He came out of the war a lieutenant colonel and organized the Arizona Air National Guard. By 1962 he was a major general in the reserves with a logbook listing pilot hours in 75 different types of aircraft. He was elected to the Phoenix City Council in 1949 and to the U.S. Senate in 1952 and 1958. Before World War II he had integrated the employees of his family department store, and he enforced integration of the Arizona Air National Guard two years before President Truman ordered desegregation of the armed forces. He desegregated the lunch counters of Phoenix and was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League.But to make his connection to Milton Friedman more explicit I will quote one paragraph from Goldwater's book The Conscience of a Conservative to give a summary of his views:I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I did not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' interests, I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause, I am doing the very best I can.Barry later called for an end to the draft and advocated shifting to reliance on a professional all-volunteer force. He said he would call on the Congress to exact across-the-board tax cuts to stimulate growth in the economy, which would then lead to growth in tax revenues to offset any short-term losses.I was inspired by The Conscience of a Conservative, as were a who's who of conservative leaders of the last third of the 20th century, including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, William Rehnquist, and Sandra Day O'Connor. And I must mention Hillary Rodham, a Goldwater girl in 1964, who went on to head the Young Republicans at Wellesley.I had recently joined the LSU faculty as an Assistant Professor of economics after receiving my Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 1961. At the time I arrived in Baton Rouge I was the youngest member of the economics department and an admirer of Milton Friedman, whom I had met when he came to Michigan State to present a lecture. Since I was then the president of the Michigan State graduate economics club, I had been invited by the faculty as the only student to join them for dinner that evening. Needless to say Friedman was charming and brilliant, and it was obvious to me that the faculty was clearly bested in the stimulating argumentative discourse that ensued that memorable night.A few years after I arrived at LSU, a young man named Edwin Hunter came to my office in some despair. …

LONG HISTORY OF U.S. ENERGY SUBSIDIES

U.S. GOVERNMENT subsidies for energy are as old as the nation, says Nancy Pfund, a managing partner at DBL Investors, a venture capital firm, and an anthropologist. In a recent study for DBL Investors , Pfund and coauthor Ben Healey, a Yale University economics graduate student and former Massachusetts legislative committee director, trace U.S. government energy incentives back to 1789, when leaders of the new nation slapped a tariff on the sale of British coal slipped into U.S. ports as ship ballast. Using government documents, academic papers, and a mix of other data and reports, Pfund and Healey offer a historical perspective on today’s debate over energy subsidies. Their study finds a paucity of government support for renewable energy sources compared with past government investment in coal, gas, oil, or nuclear energy sources, which helped the country transition to new energy technologies and infrastructures. The study comes as President Barack Obama continues to ...

Multi-Paradigmatic Teaching in the World of Heterodox Economics: The Case of Bretton Woods Institutions

In recent decades, there have been concerns within the economics profession about the narrowness in both graduate and undergraduate economics programs. These concerns have been based on the view that economic phenomena can be the subject of many modes of explanation, each based on a particular worldview. The premise of this paper is that any worldview can be associated with one of the four broad paradigms: functionalist, interpretive, radical humanist, and radical structuralist. This paper takes the case of Bretton Woods institutions and explains it from the four different viewpoints. It emphasizes that the four explanations are equally scientific and informative; they look at the phenomenon from their specific paradigmatic viewpoint; and together they provide both graduate and undergraduate students with a more balanced understanding of the phenomenon under consideration.

How Should the Graduate Economics Core be Changed?

The authors present suggestions by graduate students from a range of economics departments for improving the first-year core sequence in economics. The students identified a number of elements that should be added to the core: more training in building microeconomic models, a discussion of the methodological foundations of model-building, more emphasis on institutions to motivate and contextualize macroeconomic models, and greater focus on econometric practice rather than theory. The authors hope that these suggestions will encourage departments to take a fresh look at the content of the first-year core.

Getting What (Employers Think) You’re Worth – Evidence on the Gender Gap in Entry Wages among University Graduates

Since the early 1970s, wage differentials between men and women have attracted the research interest of labor economists. However, up to now empirical evidence on gender differentials of labor market entrants and the determinants of their starting wages is scarce. To fill this gap, we make use of a unique dataset on graduates in economics from a large representative German university, to investigate whether – even for such a homogeneous group of labor market entrants – a gender gap in earnings exists. Concentrating on a highly homogeneous sample limits the problem of unobserved heterogeneity, which results in an overestimation of the unexplained component of standard decompositions analyses. The results reveal that women’s entry wages are significant lower than those of their male counterparts. Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions suggest that the major part of this gap remains unexplained by gender differences in observable characteristics.

Focus on Authors

Focus on Authors

The Private Rate of Return to an Economics Degree: An Update*

The article reports estimates of the private rate of return to Economics, Law and Business degrees using the same methodology as applied to four earlier Census years in an earlier article. It shows that investment in these degrees generates a good return for individuals, although the return has declined somewhat since 2001 for Economics and Law. Of the three degrees studied here, an Economics degree generates the highest return for men. For women the rates of return estimated were lower than for men and the rate of return on a Law degree was the highest. This pattern reflects the smaller proportion of female Economics graduates in full‐time employment and the lower median incomes of those in full‐time employment. In the light of the continuing decline in completions in Economics, this article offers some evidence of the positive monetary benefits of completing an Economics degree which can be used to encourage students to study more Economics.

Comparing the early research performance of PhD graduates in labor economics in Europe and the USA

This paper analyzes the early research performance of PhD graduates in labor economics, addressing the following questions: Are there major productivity d ifferences between graduates from American and European institutions? If so, how relevant is the q uality of the training received (i.e. ranking of in stitution and supervisor) and the research environment in the subsequent job placement institution? The populati on under study consists of labor economics PhD graduates who received their degree in the years 2000 to 2005 in Europe or the USA. Research productivity is evaluated alternatively as the number of publicati ons or the quality-adjusted number of publications of a n individual. When restricting the analysis to the number of publications, results suggest a higher pr oductivity by graduates from European universities than from USA universities, but this difference vanishes when accounting for the quality of the publication . The results also indicate that graduates placed at American institutions, in particular top ones, are likely to publish more quality-adjusted articles than their E uropean counterparts. This may be because, when hir ed, they already have several good acceptances or becau se of more focused research efforts and clearer car eer incentives.

How Do Students at Median Graduate Economic Programs Differ from Students at Top-ranked Programs?

This paper reports the results of a survey of students at median economics graduate programs and compares it with the results of a survey of students at top economics graduate programs done by Colander. Overall, a study of the data shows that while there are some differences in the student views, there are large areas of similarity. Some of the particular findings are that there are more US respondents in median programs than in top programs, median students have more interest in econometrics, history of thought and economic literature than do students at top programs, although after the fifth year, their interest in any field drops significantly. Results also indicate that students at top schools are much more likely to be involved in writing scholarly papers, and that students at top schools give far less emphasis to excellence in mathematics as a path to the fast track than do students at median schools.

Introduction

This symposium is a memorial to Professor W. B. Reddaway who was a patron of the Cambridge Journal of Economics. With his particular brand of applied economics Brian Reddaway made a major impact on how research was done in Cambridge and elsewhere. He spurned formalistic modelling, preferring a more realistic orientation, and generally framed his research within a broad Marshallian and Keynesian understanding of how economies operate. He had a strong preference for well presented statistical argument over econometric analysis. His interests lay in practical problems and he made major contributions in the areas of populations growth, productivity and technical change, the impact of tax systems on industry and international capital flows. As the Director of the Department of Applied Economics, he had a major influence on the research of others. His method dominated the teaching of statistics in Cambridge, and a background in Reddaway economics made Cambridge economics graduates especially employable in government service, economic consultancies, banks and private companies, where relevant and comprehensible economic analysis has high priority. Brian Reddaway also took his citizenship role seriously. He edited the Economic Journal. As Chairman of the Faculty of Economics and Politics he balanced competing demands and championed teaching and examination reforms at the University level. He was centrally involved in the running of Clare College, especially in the management of its financial portfolio. He also made a major contribution to policy through his role as economic advisor of governments. This included his work on: rationing and other World War II policy initiatives; prices and incomes policies in Australia and Britain; and on development for India and other countries. A major driving force in his policy contribution was the alleviation of poverty in the midst of potential plenty.

Minorities' Fields of Expertise in Economics and Employment Demand in These Fields

Efforts by public and private institutions to increase the number of minorities participating in graduate economics programs has contributed to a growing supply of Ph. D. trained minority economists. However, minorities are still under-represented as faculty members in economics departments. This presidential address explores whether the concentration of minorities in a few fields of specialization creates a demand-supply mismatch for these individuals.

Sources of Economics Majors: More Biology, Less Business

This paper uses national data from 1975 to 2003 to examine which alternative academic disciplines were chosen by undergraduates as if they were complements to, or substitutes for, an economics major. One familiar hypothesis suggests that majoring in economics is a reluctant choice for students more interested in a business major. However, when the proportion of economics majors is considered across all disciplines, I find a striking inverse relation between the shares of graduating majors in economics and those in biology; no relationship between any other two disciplines is closer. The paper closes with speculations about possible reasons for the strong negative relation between the shares of graduates in biology and economics.

Graduates in economics and educational mismatch: the case study of the University of Naples ‘Parthenope’1

The quality of jobs of economics graduates was studied in terms of educational mismatch. The returns of over‐education on earnings and on the job‐search were also investigated. The discussion regards the second wave of a longitudinal survey of a random sample of economics graduates from the University of Naples ‘Parthenope’, a major school of economics in southern Italy. Over‐education was measured using two different indicators of educational mismatch, one based on an objective parameter and the other on the same parameter combined with a subjective one. A probit regression with selection was carried out to analyse the influence of a set of control variables (such as family, background, employment geography and characteristics of job, work history, gender and channels used to enter the labour market) on over‐education. The same variables were used to study the returns of over‐education on earnings and on the job‐search. The probability of being over‐educated was significantly affected by gender, attainments in Higher Education (HE), channels used to enter the labour market, job location and job sector applied for. Females, lower HE achievers and graduates working in trade/sales or information systems sectors were more likely to be over‐educated than other subjects, whereas use of further education to enter the labour market decreased the probability of being over‐educated. Over‐educated workers were found to have a high probability of low earnings. Over‐education and low earnings induced workers to change jobs.

The Making of a Global European Economist

SUMMARYThis paper provides results of a survey of European graduate programs that are designing their programs to be similar to top US programs and compares those results to an earlier study done by the author of US schools. The study (1) provides a profile of European graduate economics students; (2) considers the degree to which European training at these schools differs from U.S. training, (3) offers some insights into the differences that exist among some top European programs in economics, and (4) provides a glimpse of the views that the students have of economics and of the training they are receiving. It finds that these global European programs are similar in many ways to US programs and that the students are satisfied with the programs. However, because of the different job markets in the US and Europe, it is not clear that the training is appropriate for the majority of European students. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the concerns that should be kept in mind by other programs as they consider adapting their programs to become a ‘global’ program. These concerns include the argument that the traditional European system did a number of things right; the European academic economics institutional structure is quite different from the U.S. institutional structure; and the U.S. system has its own set of problems.

Verteilungseffekte der öffentlichen Finanzierung der Hochschulbildung in Deutschland: Eine Längsschnittbetrachtung auf der Basis des Sozioökonomischen Panels / The Distributional Effects of Public Higher Education Financing in Germany: A Longitudinal Approach based on the Socioeconomic Panel

Summary This paper examines the distributional effects of public higher education financing in a lifetime perspective. The benefits that university graduates obtain in terms of their tertiary education are compared to the graduates’ education-related (tax) burden. To calculate the education-related tax burden, we resort to the proportionality approach and use data from the Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) as well as from the Sample Survey of Income and Expenditure (EVS). We show that graduates benefit from positive net effects of public higher education subsidies because they do not pay back the costs of their tertiary education by their corresponding tax payments. We observe especially high net effects for health professionals, and especially low net effects for university graduates in law, economics, and social sciences. Compared to earlier studies, the absolute net effects have even increased for graduates. Based on the observed net effects we compute a differentiated system of tuition fees that take into account the varying net effects for the various university types and fields of study.

Comparing the Early Research Performance of PhD Graduates in Labor Economics in Europe and the USA

This paper analyzes the early research performance of PhD graduates in labor economics, addressing the following questions: Are there major productivity differences between graduates from American and European institutions? If so, how relevant is the quality of the training received (i.e. ranking of institution and supervisor) and the research environment in the subsequent job placement institution? The population under study consists of labor economics PhD graduates who received their degree in the years 2000 to 2005 in Europe or the USA. Research productivity is evaluated alternatively as the number of publications or the quality-adjusted number of publications of an individual. When restricting the analysis to the number of publications, results suggest a higher productivity by graduates from European universities than from USA universities, but this difference vanishes when accounting for the quality of the publication. The results also indicate that graduates placed at American institutions, in particular top ones, are likely to publish more quality-adjusted articles than their European counterparts. This may be because, when hired, they already have several good acceptances or because of more focused research efforts and clearer career incentives.

Comparing the Early Research Performance of PhD Graduates in Labor Economics in Europe and the USA

This paper analyzes the early research performance of PhD graduates in labor economics, addressing the following questions: Are there major productivity differences between graduates from American and European institutions? If so, how relevant is the quality of the training received (i.e. ranking of institution and supervisor) and the research environment in the subsequent job placement institution? The population under study consists of labor economics PhD graduates who received their degree in the years 2000 to 2005 in Europe or the USA. Research productivity is evaluated alternatively as the number of publications or the quality-adjusted number of publications of an individual. When restricting the analysis to the number of publications, results suggest a higher productivity by graduates from European universities than from USA universities, but this difference vanishes when accounting for the quality of the publication. The results also indicate that graduates placed at American institutions, in particular top ones, are likely to publish more quality-adjusted articles than their European counterparts. This may be because, when hired, they already have several good acceptances or because of more focused research efforts and clearer career incentives.

A note on educational performance of economics graduate programs in East and Southeast Asia

This paper considers educational performance of economics graduate programs in East and Southeast Asia by examining the highest educational origins of the regional contributors in the top five journals between January 1995 and July 2005. Evidence proves that East and Southeast Asian graduates represent 13% of the contributors, have a 10% share of the regional aggregate AER-equivalent-length pages, and American doctors are dominant. Educational productivity of East and Southeast Asian economics graduate programs is thought to be equal, at best, to that of the middle-ranked ones in the United States top-50 schools.

General English Attrition and Its Significance for Business English Teaching/Learning of Prospective Economists

This article summarizes some of the findings of a large-scale study of the foreign language needs of economics students (Čepon 2007). It focuses on the rationale behind the lengthy period of disuse of general English (GE) during economics students’ first year of undergraduate study. The article presents evidence for processes of GE attrition that slowly set in and are deemed to be particularly detrimental to economics. It is also important to determine exactly which language needs are essential for the future professional development of the economics graduates. It is hoped that this will spur foreign language policy renewal.

A Comparative Analysis of Economics Graduates' Learning Attitudes: Implications for Teaching

We report on the results of a two-phase survey aiming to explore the learning preferences of graduates in economics, compare the findings with graduates in other disciplines, and identify the determinant dimensions of their developed learning preferences. Economics graduates are compared against business administration, engineering, accounting-finance-banking, trading-maritime-marketing, maths-stats-informatics, and public administration graduates. A group of miscellaneous graduates is also included for graduates not-classifiable in the aforementioned groups. Kolb's LSIv3 has been utilized in identifying student learning styles. First-phase sample consists of 288 graduates and second-phase sample consists of 496 graduates. All these graduates attended post-graduate programs classes at nine Greek major universities. Both samples are relatively balanced as regards gender participation with a small female prevalence over males. Results show assimilating types to be the prevailing group, followed by converging, diverging, and accommodating types for both phases. Economics graduates are predominantly assimilators, while significant differences are found mainly in the perceiving dimension of learning ((AC-CE) dimension in Kolb's model) between them and same learning style type graduates in other disciplines. A grid presentation of individual scores for all participants reveals a higher concentration of assimilating types for the second phase sample, while accommodating types are in relative scarcity in both phases. Factor analyses reveal that processing and transforming of information and experience into knowledge ((AE-RO) dimension in Kolb's model) is the most significant determinant dimension in student learning for all groups of graduates for both phases. Overall, results have implications for teaching of economics. The impact of selecting and implementing teaching strategies based on lectures is discussed and we argue in favor of active student engagement in the teaching-learning procedure. Finally, we put forward some propositions for further research.