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.

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:)

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.

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.:)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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/

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.

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.

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!"

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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?:))

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.:))