Personal Econtrack

2010-10-11T12:03:00.000-07:00

MIT Economics in the spotlight

After Ester Duflo received the prestigious Bates medal this Spring (link) today MIT got another strike by having Peter Diamond appointed as one of the three Nobel laureats in Economics (link).
This is great! and I am happy that the department is finally getting the recognition it deserves. Let's just hope that the media hype does not take over (in terms of TT criterias and other areas where it should not belong) like in the case of neighboring schools.

2010-10-04T02:54:00.000-07:00

Research and teaching fellowship in Kyrgyzstan

FELLOWSHIP- 4 Teaching & Research Fellowships, OSCE Academy in Bishkek, KG

4 Research & Teaching Fellowships at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
Application Deadline: 5 pm, October 15, 2010

The OSCE Academy in Bishkek is a public foundation designed to promote and enhance the principles and aims of the OSCE in the Central Asian region, enshrined in its fundamental idea of comprehensive security. Located in Bishkek, the OSCE Academy is strongly embedded in the wider Central Asian academic and political context and follows a distinctive regional approach in its activities.

The Academy is looking for four Teaching and Research Fellows for the following graduate level courses:
1. Cases in International Relations
2. Foreign Policy Analysis
3. Political Economy
4. Comparative Politics: Democratization Studies

Interested applicants should submit their CV, a short summary of their research project, and two letters of reference from people familiar with the candidate's academic work to Ms. Aigoul Abdoubaetova by e-mail: a.abdoubaetova@osce-academy.net by October 15, 2011, 5 p.m. Bishkek time.

The OSCE Academy in Bishkek is an equal-opportunity institution. It operates on the principle of non-discrimination. All recruitment decisions are taken on the basis of best qualification of the candidates, with consideration of regional and gender balance.

More info: http://www.osce-academy.net/en/opportunities

2010-10-04T02:51:00.000-07:00

Scholarship for Eastern Europeans

Herder Scholarship Awarded for Excellent Students from CEE/SEE
sponsored by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation

The scholarship is aimed at Central and Eastern European students under the age of 30 and Central and Eastern European PhD students under the age of 35 (PhD students over 30 should give an explanation in their application letter), who wish to complete an academic degree in Vienna.
The final stage of a degree, a higher degree or PhD at a Vienna university is sponsored in the fields of European studies, the cultural sciences, humanities and social sciences, the fine arts, music, architecture as well as agricultural sciences and forestry.

The amount of money paid out is 920 € per month. The duration of sponsorship can be up to one year.

Eligibility: Applicants must have a sufficient level of German skills.
Deadline: November 30, 2010
Contact: Hélène Ericke, Scholarship Programme Administrator
Tel.: +49 (0)40 33 402 11
E-mail: ericke@toepfer-fvs.de
Internet: http://toepfer-fvs.de/herder-stipendium.html?&L=1

2010-10-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

How to achieve Zen-writing style

Economists love to brag and even implement a very concise style of writing which tends to avoid stuffy arguments, behind-the-bush stories and all those wonderful things that some of us (me included) enjoy sometimes. However, what life and the job market experience teaches you is that "THE STORY" matters. So, how to refine and distill something appealing to you into a good publication? Well, that for all those young PhDs out there to discover. And this article as well...as a base for refining your intellectual outflow.

2009-08-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

Stata 32bit vs. 64 bit - Try it for free!

Stata offers free upgrade for Mac users from 32 to 64 bit. This is significantly faster as Stata itself is trying to show with this comparison:
--------------------------------------------
command 32-bit 64-bit
-----------------------------------------
sort 2.00 1.64 seconds
regress 0.88 0.80
-----------------------------------------
timings from 1.4 GHz AMD Opteron 240
running 64-bit Windows.
---------------------------------------------
Obviously you need to have a copy of Stata 10 up and running (IC, SE or MP) and then you can download and upgrade free to 64 bit version. Remember to update afterwards your Stata.
The 64 bit upgrade can be downloaded from: http://www.stata.com/support/updates/stata10/mac/
Installation is a banality like most Mac Apps.
Have fun!

2009-07-29T10:47:00.001-07:00

New Stata 11

The new version of Stata (11) ships July 27. Among the new features: Multiple imputation, GMM (both linear and nonlinear models), competing-risk regressions, multivariate time series, unit root tests and marginal analysis, topping a new interface and fonts.

Order at: www.stata.com

2009-06-15T16:50:00.000-07:00

Closure or a new Start?

It is done. The thesis itself. Putting the pieces together and transferring everything from Scientific Workplace and a couple of files from MS Word proved to be easier than anticipated. The final output looks great and I am thinking now to switch totally to WindEdt or maybe TexMacs, rather than SWP. Once you master the code, it comes easy; plus the net is quite full with examples and wiki pages. Now it is time to chill a bit. Until the defense and the subsequent paperwork that I will have to clear in a couple of days before my trip back home.

2009-05-31T15:49:00.000-07:00

LaTeX, Bread and Butter

That's how my Facebook twitter sounded like a couple of days ago. And yes, it was actually like that, except the bread and butter part, of course. Not that I would have minded them, it's just that I am more like a "coffee with milk & a banana" type of person.
So, yes, about two weeks ago I slowly started to migrate my work from Scientific Workplace and Word to LaTeX. Initially I tried to get support from people here at RPI, but they all seem to have magically disappeared and to this day, I only exchanged a couple of emails with a person that was nice enough to care. Of course, no help there.However, motivated by whoknowswhat I started to dwell in to it myself and look for online resources to deal with it. There are some nice websites (just google your question) that will get you a long way but in my case, just like yours, I suspect, the problem is the actual understanding of how LaTeX really works. Like the fact that &, % or _,are not accepted in a sentence unless they're treated as special characters or in math mode. Various stuff like that I would have liked to learn from somebody rather than searching the web and applying the old try& fail techniques. Oh, well, now it doesn't matter. 150 pages of nice LaTeX output awaits to be defended, printed and deposited in the library. I almost forgot all the trouble that I went through just to insert some graphicx or tables in my thesis. And two weeks is not a bad performance at all considering the slope of the learning curve involved:)

2009-05-08T15:30:00.000-07:00

PDF Repair Tools

Today I was again scanning some tables of data and some pictures from a book on the international rubber industry. The cool thing about it is that the scanner sends it automatically to your email or a specified folder. The bad thing about it is that this time it didn't came through. I has 110 MB of scans (only 2 X 30 pages) in two batches (first came out wrong). Thank God I was forwarding all my emails to Gmail, otherwise my RPI account would have been flooded (or not? - i don't know the limit nowadays). Anyways, all well...but when to open the files, errors on top of errors. Again, very lucky that wasn't anything essential; just some add-on facts to my paper (best case). However, I was a bit pissed off, thus attempted to recover whatever is to recover. Not a lot of free software out there.. and the results are far from perfect. Try pdf tools online (here) if you don't mind a bit of watermark (i didn't!) or some of the shareware programs on the web. I give the pdf online tool a big thumbs up: fast upload, good recognition and easy interface; plus no installation is necessary. Cheers.

2009-04-20T07:08:00.000-07:00

Cambridge Short Interlude

A short trip to Boston for an interview at Harvard. I was excited both to get an interview at the most prestigious school in the world and also to finally get to see a bit Cambridge. Last time in Boston I did not have time to cross the river but now I decided to go around a bit.
It was pretty nice to walk to small yet picturesque streets of Cambridge. However, the freezing weather (33 F) was working steadily against my rather light business attire, so I had to get inside after half and hour of strolling. The interview went very well, and I think I can bring a lot of the requirements to this position and much more beyond. And yes, the opportunities ahead look so exciting. However, throughout my time in Boston I felt great, energized by the city's vibe; lots of young people and very colorful characters. While still a New-York lover, Manhattan fan, Boston always made a good impression on me. Although the subway, called the T, can definitely sustain some improvements (green line was terrible slow and all lines are extremely crowded). But, those are just minor complaints. I look forward to coming back here for good.:)

2009-04-20T07:06:00.001-07:00

Workalcoholism

Can be dangerous. From robotic work in coding the data and transcribing things from paper to electronic resources, I felt drained and fatigued. The fact is, that after 10-13 daily hours of coding data, is it impossible not to be such a vegetable. However, I took comfort in seeing how the data set grew constantly every day (no disappointments there) and reach the finish line sooner than expected (3 weeks overall). However, it took a lot of effort.
Important issue: do you set up codes at the beginning of the process and make different ones as you advance or you just enter everything and code at the end? well, I think starting to code the firms, plants, countries at the beginning is the best way, especially in my case, where things do not change radically from year to year. In this case, you just need to make sure that everything is up to date and just add new codes for new entries (plants, firms, countries). So, if I were to do it again, I would assign codes from the very start. But again, it might be different in each case.

2009-01-26T14:55:00.000-08:00

Let Code Together..

..right now..ohh yeah..in a Sweet Harmony. WHO was around in 1993-1994 might still remember this song of The Beloved..in a video that was clevearly catching your eyes with some possible nudity of a dozen models while blurring their private parts with some creative ..techniques.:))
While this has started as an introductory digression, I do not wish to digress further into the world of incidental , so I will get right to the point. I have now for several weeks start to code my latest dataset and along to my future planed additions this will make (hopefully) a great and flexible tool for various research questions at the plant, firm and country level. Heck, I might throw in some of that multi-level analysis, if possible. And although now the hope are high and the anxiety building on future possible ramifications of this project, the coding is a haunting task. Although it seems faster than anticipated, and with less stress associated, due to other external reasons, still staying still for hours and checking and double checking everything, matching names et al. is not as fun as it looks.

2009-01-26T14:32:00.000-08:00

The Publishing Conundrums and some Surprising Fast Rewards

I have opted in the end for a more trade oriented journal as suggested by Mr. X, the editor of my previous try, and it seems that he was right. Lesson #1: do your homework before submitting!! but on the other hand, don't get me wrong the former journal was fitted like a glove, in terms of geographical and comparative scope of the work debated there. However, Lesson #2: The editor is ALWAYS right! so there is no point in being upset if your work doesn't make it..which brings me to Lesson #3: Search & you will find it. There are so many economic journals nowadays that if you indeed pursue a new endeavor, did something new or interesting, you will find THE ONE which is better suited for your work. However, keep in mind, the final lesson of this small publishing grievance article: "Small can be beautiful! (but especially a lot faster)" I have heard stuff like it takes 2-3 years to publish in second tier A journals, and from my experience even with lesser ranked journals in Economics it takes on average 12-15 months...so if you have the right stuff for the next AER or JEL issue, hold your breath and un-cross your fingers...it might take a while..
On the other hand, exceptions are always welcomed. And I have just benefited from one, which made me happy and quite optimistic that not the whole world functions in the same agnostic way.

2009-01-11T20:25:00.000-08:00

Choosing the best OCR software for you

Proved to be a haunting task for me (at least). I was trying to get some scanned data into excel. However, multiple problems:
- scanning quality (some pages were too dark for OCR)--> hence, unusable
- miss-recognition (getting an O instead of 0 and Gs instead of 6ers can become a common pain in the @@$)
- complex tables (this is the biggest challenge, since messing up the columns is hard to fix post-processing).
Choosing an OCR software
I have tried several software (both under Win and Mac): first my personal favorite..a small OCR simple program called Able2Extract Professional. Obviously it does the work for simple tables usually from clean-cut pdfs. In most cases, doesn't go beyond that. Then moved up to the big guns: ABBYY Finereader Pro 9.0 , IRIS.Readiris.Pro.v11.5.6 and OmniPage.Professional.v16.0. However, none of the above blew me away. Abby is terrible slow but seems to have a bit more options for customization, Omnipage is the fastest and the best quality, but I had trouble in doing what I wanted to.
Conclusion:
In the end, none of the above could do both a FAST and HI-Q OCR recognition of text considering the difficulties associated with my PDF files. My Chinese names and other foreign firms were painful to distinguish even for me, not to mention any OCR soft, thus in the end, I opted for manual data recognition (MDR) and I just entered it myself in Excel. Lots and lots of hours and nerves wasted, but in the end I think it would have taken the same (or more) hours just to follow, correct and change the OCR outputs.

2008-11-22T15:59:00.000-08:00

New submission

Finally, I decided that I shouldn't wait anymore for feedback on polishing my second essay from my dissertation. Since I haven't made huge modifications since it became a working paper in Kiel, basically these 8 months were close to wasted. Instead, I could have been better off by just submitting it; at least, by now, I would have got some referee reports and probably accommodate them. Hence, I decided not to wait anymore. I opted for an outlet that is specialized in Economic Comparisons and especially ones involving transition and developing countries. I really see a good match with my work and I hope I will be able to publish it there. Moreover, Journal of Comparative Economics has a pretty good impact factor: 0.69-1.12, pending on the reference, and some prestigious scholars in the editorial board:D. Berkowitz (Pittsburgh), G. Roland (UC Berkley), A. Banerjee (MIT), S. Djankov (World Bank), W. Easterly (NYU), S. Johnson (MIT).

2008-11-19T08:39:00.000-08:00

Getting Keen on Social Network Analysis

Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.

Diffusion of innovations theory explores social networks and their role in influencing the spread of new ideas and practices. Change agents and opinion leaders often play major roles in spurring the adoption of innovations, although factors inherent to the innovations also play a role.
But besides all this wiki stuff, now we can also do network regressions which seems a lot better than all the previous measures (Betweeness, Centrality etc.) that resemble more with descriptive statistics. To me that is exciting and I have to look more into it soon.
Some Resources: http://group10.sustainapedianw.org/?cat=36; http://www.insna.org/; http://www.analytictech.com/networks/; http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/tse-portal/analysis/social-network-analysis/

2008-11-18T20:42:00.000-08:00

Job Market
Yes, it already is that time of the year. Yesterday's PhD student looking for a nice summer and long break becomes today's sturdy candidate for an academic position and tomorrow's colleague. For some it might come naturally and obviously but for others might be different. While I look forward to finish my PhD and move to the next stage of my life, I still miss a couple of weeks that could make a difference on how one settles everything into place.

2008-11-16T13:01:00.000-08:00

The Excitement of Something New

These couple of months I had to come up with an idea for a third essay of my dissertation. While aiming for something very different and more micro oriented, I still wanted to keep the focus of my thesis on the international aspects of innovation and technology transfer and especially on developing countries. And yes, after a couple of weeks and meetings with my advisor, I am happy to say that I found something nice. The basic idea is to look at alliances in the global the tire industry between different firms and see who is providing technology, to whom and why. There are about 350 firms globally, all producing tires in various countries of the world. Every year about 50 to 70 such technological agreements occur usually between firms from developed and developing countries, but not always.Moreover, the tire industry, although a mature one, has a good pace of technological innovation and high competition, which make it even more interesting.

2008-11-02T13:19:00.001-08:00

The busiest time ever

Well, after all the travel and presentations, now comes the heavy stuff. October and November are the months when one graduate student in Economics who's going to be on the market this year needs to do the lion's share of the work: read & collect the relevant job adds from AEA's JOE, ERN, AMA and whatever they think is a fit for them, polish the job market paper, publish "it" or "them" if one is lucky enough to have more finished project, write nice CVs and letters for your future possible employers and keep working on your dissertation. Although is challenging and (sometimes) even fun, these days are quite crazy for me, working at least 15hrs per days in trying to accommodate all of the above. It would be also desirable to get some nice results in terms of job perspectives but one can only hope so, since competition is going to be tough this year. However, "Semper Spes!"

2008-11-01T09:48:00.000-07:00

Importing Excel To LaTeX

It might seem trivial to you, but importing Excel tables is not that easy to do in LaTeX. I have used this program Xcel2Latex that basically generates an add-on in Excel which allows you to export the table as a TXT file that I recognized by your TEX editor. Although migration works fairly well in this manner, it is desirable to keep the table as simple as possible (less merged cells etc) and work with it under LaTeX afterwards.
Happy Tabulating!

2008-10-29T16:23:00.000-07:00

Pleasant reminescence from the past

Today shuffling the email I got dealing with transition economies, I was surprised enough to find a paper co-authored by one of my previous professors. Although it is mostly a short monography not destined for academic puposes, the topic is interesting and it is good to see people from Romania finally aiming towards some international exposure and recognition. However, my prior opinion stay firmly rooted: in social science we have a pretty darn long way to cover since we are still back in the 80's. Hopefully we'll get there.. somehow.. Otherwise, probably in 25 years we'll all take lessons from some Chinese or Indian professor.:)
Link to the paper.

2008-10-27T06:17:00.000-07:00

BeerEconomics - Mixing Business with Pleasure?

LICOS Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance is organizing the first ever Beeronomics Conference from the 27th to 29th May 2009 in Leuven, Belgium.

The first Beeronomics Conference is meant to provide a forum to exchange ideas and high-quality economic research related to the economics of beer, brewing and related activities. It covers a wide array of topics, including, but not limited to: production, trade, industrial organization, economic history, law and economics, marketing, consumption, policy and regulation, macroeconomics, etc.

As the country of beers, we thought that Belgium would be the appropriate place for this conference, and as the city hosting the famous “Old Market” (well known among beer lovers), the headquarters of InBev (the world’s largest brewing holding), and a prestigious university (the Catholic University of Leuven), Leuven would be the perfect town.

2008-09-04T07:26:00.001-07:00

The Never-ending game of polishing your paper

Today I stated to revise (again) my paper on R&D spillovers but as always, there is a trade off between how radical one want the revision to be and the available and desirable time to invest in it. I believe I made the right choice by moderating myself and all the "other" things can be addressed in future work rather than struggling and stressing over right now. Anyways, I manage to migrate the whole paper in TEX format after some time and it looks fairly good. Another thing that struck me was how much we change and evolve in a matter of months: you get excited about a topic, write something, get some presentations out, are close to publishing and then move on to a different topic; the distance starts to increase between your current interests and the paper; you submit it somewhere; more months pass by and you are almost finishing the other paper; pending on the name/status of the journal you've submitted your 1st piece, other months pass by, you get the second paper out and start presenting it; in the meanwhile you get the referee report and it asks you for some things; you have to dive back into the first one, although you may not want to, etc; do the required things, get back into those issues and things, etc. pretty strange duality, so more papers and different you have, the harder you're making it for yourself. The second funny thing is word/expression perishability in a matter of months I discovered that I could have formulated some things a whole lot better than I initially did.

2008-08-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

The Good News
Today I finally heard back from the targeted journal. The two magic words "R&R" were not explicitly there but from the overall positive tone and general remarks I already felt very good. Indeed somewhere in the text, this suggestion was inserted between a praise and a comment. The very good news is that I have already revised the paper and attempted to deal with what (I thought that) seems weak in it, thus, I already have accommodated most of the reviewers' comments. Now, I just need to address the rest in a careful manner and resubmit it, which shouldn't take more than two weeks to do. So, back to work!

2008-07-01T07:19:00.000-07:00

Revisions(the ever lasting need for)

Just finished revising an older paper..and it's no fun. Adding new data, modifying everything (tables, graphs) and even beyond (model, variables etc.) which gave again rise to those emotions associated with running some new regressions and not knowing what to expect and how would it be optimal to go about it. As usual, no advising assistance and this time nor much access to the literature (home base "advantages"). However, everything came out right, better and sharper than before. However, just finished this work (deadline for conference can be such a nice incentiviser) but already know how and what to do to make it bigger and best. It will ever end?:))

2008-06-20T10:36:00.000-07:00

Evolutionary vs. Neoclassical Economics

It is in the man's nature (and especially the homo economicus one) to question everything and criticize it as best as he or she can. Although I agree with the vast majority of these critiques, people forget a couple of things: first, the neoclassical tools are just the tip of the iceberg..some formal old school stuff that insert in your mind crucial economic concepts (like scarcity or utility etc) that will shape your view of the world. The main thing is to understand, accept and develop it. but afterall, NO GOOD ECONOMIST takes it literally. On the other hand, I would like to see concrete alternatives to it. But...naturally there aren't...so we stick to the same old thing or we make simple incremental contributions. Which is fine. Big minds need to grow also. Plus, in order to be constructive and throughout in these assertions, one also has to know the neo-classical world pretty well. (...to be continued) It is hilarious however, to be in the middle...while attending tight econometric conferences to be called an airhead while in the opposite case being labeled as "neoclassical" which is among the lower lifeforms on Earth.:))

2008-05-07T14:06:00.001-07:00

Finishing the Job
After a couple of (more) weeks of struggle I finalized my second ASP paper with a bang, this being that I used some LaTeX to type it in. Regardless of the fact that I am a novice in that and I couldn't find the perfect shell for my taste, the paper looks great and I am pleased also by the content:))..In this one, I compare the contribution of embodied versus disembodied spillovers of knowledge from abroad on transitional countries from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as former Soviet states from Central Asia. The results reveal trade (in intermediate and in direct technology purchases) to be the most important channel, while foreign direct investment and patenting are significant carriers of technology but with lesser impacts.

2008-04-17T07:52:00.000-07:00

Off to publication: Where? Why?

I guess is hard to know when exactly is your paper ready to take a life of its own into the pages of a journal. Moreover, which journal and how to optimize your submission. These are pretty tough questions, one needs to answer on its own. What I personally did to try in figuring out which journal to target is to answer to the questions below and then fine-tune your search accordingly:
1. What kind of CONTRIBUTION you make (theory/empirics) (major/minor) etc?
2. What is the TOP JOURNAL for your field?
3. Where do most of your references come from?
4. Decide between "diversify" or stick with your "pack" of the literature?
5. Inter-temporal trade-offs: Do you have 1-2 years to publish in a top 20 journal or you need a publication faster?
6. Ask people around (although you may easily get "no convergence" between answers and even a huge dispersion, pending on the other person's background, preferences, abilities and aim).
Good luck!

2008-03-14T00:54:00.000-07:00

Back Again

I started working on a second ASP working paper which due to time constraints will be shorter and probably more theoretical. The point would be to criticize & improve the existing weighting schemes used in the literature, and empirically, to explore direct technology diffusion via patenting. However, the patenting data is quite bad thus, I am a bit dissapointed since I will have to put in about 50 hrs of work just for the data. And that's not nice if nothing worthwhile comes out, especially since it is not one's fault.

2008-03-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

First time - always special

I finally made today the big step of sending a paper for publication. Indeed, it is a big step, especially if one finds him/herself alone in this process, which is highly bureaucratic (at least from all the guidelines et al. - we still have to check that in practice -) and demanding. After revising your paper for a couple of good times and presenting it in various conferences, there is no way back. At least for me. I felt like I need to do it now. Especially, if one thinks about the lag between submission and actual publication. We are young...but maybe not that eager to wait. March the 7th, hopefully under a good sign. And a good journal (Research Policy) which has drawn me from the start and is exactly representative for this field.

2008-03-05T14:15:00.000-08:00

There is nothing like a bit of spam

Today I had to clean this blog of all comments, since I guess they were all spam. Anyways, it would be nice to have a tool that doesn't allow people to leave links in the comments section.

2008-03-05T14:04:00.000-08:00

Revision for Submission

I started today to revise my first thesis essay. It is time for it to fly somewhere more official that on my hard drive. Moreover, I think I have reached the limits of the tiny dataset and problems associated with transitional countries. Finally, I opted for a FGLS estimator and included the 2007 patent data as well. With this occasion I have noticed two things: 1)how fast I have adapted and improved my writing style (I think my second paper is far better written and structured than the 1st) 2)how fast we forget things we've worked for ages.(it is really hard to get back into it and do it again, and do it better). However, somebody has to do it. Also it would be nice as an outcome a publication in a good journal over the next year. howgh!

2008-03-05T13:58:00.000-08:00

Robustness is the buzzword

This last weekend I have spended all my time and energy to perform one more robustness check..the ultimate one that is. It just consists of re-doing all the spillover variables using a different weighting scheme. Initially, I have used the original Coe and Helpman (1995) ones. This time around the Lichtenberg and Van Pottelsberghe (1998) weights were applied to the international R&D stocks in order to tease out the spillovers arising via trade and FDI. With relief and pleasure one finds out that the results hold and are very similar. Triple stars around your estimates are always welcomed.

2008-02-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

Another (the last) one bites the dust

The last course, that is. International Banking and Finance. Was not a great display of econometric skills (deh, that's the value of this literature just like in some strains of business administration) but at least it was a chill, thanks to the instructor: Dr. Degryse from KU Leuven and Tilburg. "Plenty" of time now to get to business and figure out a topic for the next paper and take care of a zillion other administrative stuff.

2008-02-12T13:37:00.000-08:00

The next step: Powerpoint Presentation

After working hard on it, it is only natural that you get to present your creation in public. This week is just the ASP conference paper, but a good rehersal for things to come (e.g. the next DIMETIC session in Strasbourg). Anyways, I am (again) really pleased with both the content and the look of my presentation, which is really strange:))..knowing how peaky I am, but good overall.

Finally, I almost forgot. A friendly and funny reminder with what and how NOT to do a presentation. Enjoy!

2008-02-10T04:03:00.000-08:00

An outside view of (these cynical) Economists

A nice article about it in NY Times

2008-01-31T05:42:00.001-08:00

Endogenous growth course

This week the reason for taking on this ASP program will reveal itself to me. Innovation and Growth (taught by Dr. Zilibotti of University of Zurich)is basically what made me choose this program which overall it has a very good one anyways.

2008-01-24T00:12:00.000-08:00

Akward Mobile office

For the last hours in the Budapest airport, I had to beat down the fatigue through work. It's a funny feeling though to work while hundreds of people pass you by. Loud music helps as always. Some future ideas and conference applications have been successfully born in the time spent here.

2008-01-19T01:22:00.000-08:00

Finishing touch

Yes, I finally called it off. After a couple of robustness checks and sensitivity analysis, which in the end I have decided to not report even, due to the lack of space, I decided that is enough. Thus, I did a reading proof and attached the JEL codes to my abstract and my brand new paper is done. The result resembles me much like a Huf house, meaning exquisite, clean and robust, so I am quite excited about it and I will probably submit it somewhere before this summer.

2008-01-17T05:18:00.000-08:00

Tweaks & tests on my first essay - revisions

The Breusch-Pagan Lagrange multiplier test for random effects tests if variances of groups are zero. The BP LM values reject the null only in the first and second model, suggesting that random effects should be used in these cases against an OLS estimator.
Using a likelihood-ratio test, homoskedasticity is rejected firmly in all models. Thus I take this into account by using White cross-sectional standard errors which are robust. Beyond this, serial correlation could be biasing the estimates so I use the test described by Wooldridge (2002) and implemented in Stata. However, the null of no serial correlation can be rejected at 5 percent significance lavels in all relevant models, proving that this is not an issue for these estimations.
To make sure that my regressions are not spurious, I perform the most common two panel unit root tests involving regressions on lagged difference: Levin Lin and Chu (2002) which assumes a cross-sectional common unit root and Im, Pesaran and Shin (2003) that allow for individual unit root processes across sections.

2008-01-14T07:31:00.000-08:00

Satisfaction of a good job

I have just finished writing my paper last Friday. After a dog-week period when I worked around the clock to write it and do all the necessary analysis, the result looks promising and the paper very professional. In the end, I included various cointergration tests (e.g. Pedroni and Kao) plus all the relevant panel unit-root tests (Levin Liu and Chu, Breitung, Im Peshran and Shin, Breitung and Hadri). Eviews gives all that almost for free. Naturally, nobody knows the true spec so one includes everything (trend, itercept etc) and hopes for the best (I(1) that is). Happily for me it worked like a charm. On top of that, besides the usual OLS fixed effects model, I also managed to get some DOLS estimates which seem to outperform both OLS and FMOLS in small samples. So , everything looks good and healthy around here. Just need to finish the fine tunings and additions and send it to some journal.:)

2008-01-06T10:16:00.000-08:00

Writing is the name of the game

I have started to write up the paper yesterday. Although I have bits and pieces already, it is not that easy to put them all together, and I would really like to avoid duplicative efforts. On the other hand, it's just a first draft (from not more, hopefully than two or three) so perfection should come second.

2007-12-29T07:58:00.000-08:00

Updating...some older paper

I have started to update my previous paper analyzing patenting activities and determinants of national innovation systems in the transitional Eastern European space. Well, as always..the good the bad and the ugly features and issues are there. After all it is not like writing the whole paper again...but it takes a lot of time (too much) as well. So...I keep my fingers crossed

2007-12-13T13:30:00.000-08:00

Forced Break from my Research

This week I cannot work almost anything since I have to attend and pass the course in Monetary Policy by Mr. Eichenbaum from NorthWestern, which is a funny/smart/etc teachers...but there is a problem: these huge macro models especially monetary ones are not my thing. at all. so, hopefully it will not be too painful.

2007-12-13T09:37:00.001-08:00

Eviews 6 - Small is Beautiful

When I first ran anything on Eviews this Autumn I was quite skeptic about its true power. But when you think about it, this program knows an amazing amount of stuff for its size. And now with version 6 it gets even better (than Stata? - in some issues yes).

Not so small after its latest makeover it features some amazing new things, some of which are not available in Stata not even via the ssc channel.
See for yourself.

The things that got me jabbering was panel cointegration tests: of Pedroni (1999) up till now was the RATS's turf or Kao (2000) requiring Matlab or Gauss platforms.

2007-12-13T09:25:00.000-08:00

Seems I was right about Stata10

Unfortunately, it looks like indeed Stata10 has some serious bugs. The thing that I hate the most is running a do file with multiple specs regressions and get an error in the middle of the program because one of the variables has magically dissapeared. Sometimes is a transformation var only which can be re-done manually from the command line, but when the base variable is gone...not much one can do but clear and reload the data. Perhaps a 9.2 downgrade is not that bad after all.
Other people had the same problems.

2007-12-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

It takes a Genius to Read (some) blogs

At least, it seems so. More details here.

2007-12-05T03:36:00.000-08:00

Adding control variables

The stock of domestic R&D is a hard to get and valuable variable in the case of developing nations. On top of that I have to collect some data, measures of human capital…of which I opted for the world wide known Barro and Lee 2000 dataset and perhaps some other schooling stuff from UIS Unesco and the WID 20007.
I already used the BL 2000 and the tertiary enrollment and they seem to impact significantly the TFP spillovers, which is good. :)

2007-12-05T03:34:00.000-08:00

Finishing the business

YES, I am extremely happy to say that I have finished the FDI spillovers…sometime Sunday night before the meeting with my advisors. It wasn’t a must after all but the numbers proved to be significant despite their inherent deficiencies. However, I have to look closer at some countries that are not represented anymore in my FDI restricted sample…but again, how much and who is investing in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan? So far I don’t know but it’s on my wish list to cross-check it with the UNCTAD data.

2007-11-29T06:28:00.000-08:00

FDI related spillovers - The hard way

There aren’t many choices when you want to have flows and stocks of FDI (bilateral) among many countries. Usually people go for the OECD International Investment data which to my humble opinion is quite lame. I mean, I would expect at least to have flows among all OECD countries starting the 1990s but I guess it is to much to ask. So, just imagine how many observations can you get for, Armenia, par example. Well, usually 10-20 out of the 25 OECD times 16 years…well out of 400 let’s say. Is that workable? 
So, I decided to go with UNCTAD and their statistics. Not so inspired here either. Why? Well, they have it all at the aggregated level (total flows, stocks) but bilaterally it’s a bit better than OECD but the coverage and breakdown for developing countries is even worse (up to the national statistics office who collect the data). Moreover, the time varies 1990-2003, 04 or 05 and NATURALLY, the numbers do not match OECD ones .
The cherry on top: they are only available in PDF form!!! Not even excel… which is just great. Now I have to spend at least half an hour for each country migrating the data from PDF to Excel (which is not that easy in itself) then clean it, structure it and finally compute flows, shares, and fdi related spillovers. I just hope at the end of the day it wasn’t ALL in vain…since the data is quite scarce.

2007-11-25T02:06:00.000-08:00

The never ending story

Naturally, the flows of FDI even from the OECD nations among themselves is highly “volatile”, quality wise with a decent amount of missing observations. Not to go deeper into the problem when you look at the Eastern European ones. After computing all these stocks and flows of capital, R&D or trade I really do not feel like spending my entire life searching for bits, pieces and approximations of all the incoming FDI to my 27 transitional countries in the sample. So I guess I will probably stick (in the 1st phase at least) to trade related spillovers, since, I will also probably have to invest some time and energy into econometrics…testing for unit roots and applying panel co-integration techniques.

2007-11-20T03:00:00.000-08:00

Finished part 1 and 2

I just finished part 2, let’s say of my paper, which is computing the trade related spillovers from 25 OECD countries towards another 20 Western plus 27 Eastern and Central Asian (former Soviet Union) states using bilateral trade data from DOTS 2007 from IMF. The data looks good, it would be marvelous if one could get the same accuracy with FDI data but that’s definitely not the case . The struggle begins now…

2007-11-19T04:00:00.001-08:00

November 19, 2007

Doing all that spreadsheet tedious work

Today I continued to process all the import-export data for the OECD countries and I reached Mexico. Ten more countries to go. I have 50 receipients some of which are a bit problematic since one needs to aggregate (Belgium-Luxembourg union) or take out countries like former Czechoslovakia, URSS and very new entities without any values (Serbia on its own, Montenegro, Kosovo, etc).

2007-11-17T07:59:00.001-08:00

November 17, 2007

R&D Stocks, TFP and Labor Shares

Today I started to work on my ASP/dissertation essay on tech transfer in Eastern Europe through various diffusion channels. Basically, before I left for Italy I already have computed the R&D stocks for the countries that are spreading technology (basically OECD nations) using the perpertual inventory method with a 10 percent annual depreciation and the initial stock computation given by Griliches (1979). Yesterday and again today I took it further: first computing the TFP as a Solow residual with the usual assumed shares for labor and capital in the production function (0.65 and 0.35)—which needs to be improved over time once I find out new sources for these figures—It is a bit complicated and tedious to computed all this and I have to do it in Excell since I have a lot of problems with missing observations or countries that have started later (in Eastern Europe etc). Capital is derived from the investment data available through WPenn Tables 6.2 and GDP at PPP US $ dollars. Lots of fun  as I already mentioned
Time: At least 20 to 30 hours of work. Coverage: very good for the whole sample.

2007-11-17T07:20:00.001-08:00

Hard to Start

Finally I decided to write on this blog as well..just like a research journal..perhaps useful for others as well in the future.

2007-11-17T07:20:00.000-08:00

ANOTHER BLOG, YET DIFFERENT

Finally I decided to write on this blog as well..just like a research journal..perhaps useful for others as well in the future.
I am starting now to write a paper on "Technological diffusion in transition via trade and FDI. A comparative study between Eastern and Western Europe". I hope it will be something nice and publishable. Also, I hope that when I will be looking back this blog will seem such a neat & nice idea.:)