Archive for 27 April 2007
How Well Do You Know Your Advisor?
| Chihmao Hsieh |
Unless you’ve already seen it, here’s a quite popular comic strip glorifying and lampooning school, and particularly graduate studies. Below was the comic for 04/23 (infinitely clearer version here). Another recent good one is the sheet used for Seminar Bingo. (Caution: The comic’s archive is a happily illuminating time sink.)
The Language of Economists (and Sociologists)
| Peter Klein |
From the “news that will shock no one” department come the results of this linguistic analysis of four economics journals, the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and American Journal of Economics and Sociology, along with a control group containing the American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Microscopy, and Journal of the American Mathematical Society:
The present study aims to add to our knowledge about economic rhetoric by conducting a data-driven analysis of economic academic discourse, both synchronically in its contemporary form, and diachronically over the past four decades. We find (1) that linguistically, economics is clearly an academic genre of its own, (2) that there are at the same time clear differences in vocabulary and style usage across economic journals, and (3) that there have been major developments in economic prose during the past four decades. We argue that there is some, albeit tentative, evidence that the discipline may face an increasing methodological gap.
Here is the paper, “What Do Economists Talk About? A Linguistic Analysis of Published Writing in Economic Journals” by Nils Goldschmidt and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (American Journal of Economics and Sociology 66, no. 2, April 2007). The “gap” is between journals like the AER and EJ that use increasingly formal, empirical (scientistic?) terminology and journals like JEP and AJES that favor broader, social-science terms and concepts (“justice,” “society,” “culture,” “institutions”). Interestingly, use of social-science terminology in the AER, relative to the other journals, dropped between 1965 and 1980 but rose again between 1980 and 1990. Too early to reflect the Freakonomics phenomenon, to be sure, but perhaps a marker for economic imperialism more generally?
Political Instability and Financial Development
| Peter Klein |
The latest salvo in the debate over the role of legal origin in financial-market performance comes from Mark Roe. In “Political Instability and Financial Development” (with Jordan Siegel) he argues that political instability is a more important determinant of financial development than trade openness, latitude, and, particularly, legal origin as modeled by LLSV. “Surprisingly, despite the widespread view in the law and finance literature of legal origin’s importance, not only is political stability highly robust to legal origin, but, for many years, our results for key indicators and specifications neither show Common Law to be consistently superior nor French Civil Law to be consistently inferior to other legal families in generating strong financial development outcomes.”
See also my “Politics and Productivity” on the interaction between political institutions, economic freedom, and national economic performance.
Organizations and Markets 
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