I’m starting a new project where I need women’s labor force participation rates in the 50s and 60s in America. In particular, I need them disaggregated by state, race, and year. I have a few solutions, but would be very excited if anyone could offer others.
Here is what I know exists:
My students live-tweeted a seminar last week at Lafayette College. I was pretty stoked on it, so I made my first Storify to commemorate it.
I’m fascinated by how my students are using twitter in the classroom this semester. We’ve had some great conversations about everything from the national debt to finance to how to use Stata. I think it will only get better as the semester goes on. You can check out the conversations at #lafecon213 and #lafecon365.
Having spent some time working as a journalist, I’m not used to being the one sought out for expertise. On Thursday, the local news asked me to answer a few questions about the minimum wage. Despite the initial nerves, it was kind of fun. I don’t think they picked my most eloquent quotes, but here is the web story.
Thanks to Dan Lally for finding it for me before I was willing to search and to EPI for some last minute cramming.
One of the resounding themes of this morning’s plenary at the SVRI Forum is how to deal with high standards for statistical significance in extremely complex, sometimes dangerous and impoverished communities. In particular, the presentation on SASA!, a GBV intervention in Sub-Saharan Africa, tried to show very large effects of their program with a very small sample size and very little statistical significance. Charlotte Watts discussed at length how we shouldn’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater” and how if we’re missing statistical significance by “a hair’s breadth,” we shouldn’t ignore the results.
It grated on me that the discussion took this particular path because I think there is a large opening for those doing research to examine the different ways that we use and examine quantitative evidence, but most involved still heavily relied on the semantics of statistics. There is a strong argument for mixing qualitative and quantitative research. Each method can uncover patterns and trends and events that are not evident in the other, and qualitative work can provide justification for small-scale quantitative work with small sample sizes or insufficient power. I don’t think this is the only way of dealing with the problem, however.
We know that RCTs are expensive. Lori Heise, of the London School of Tropical Medicine, made an excellent point that if RCTs are the standard, there has to be more funding and recognition of that from the donor community.
There’s a lot of work and questioning to be done around this issue. Just because there is not sufficient power or sample size to find a statistically significant effect, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask the question, but it does affect how we can present the results. And presenting the results as of a particular magnitude (especially when that magnitude is large), just identifying that it matches the expected direction is not really sufficient and worse, perhaps disingenuous.
The end of the semester is almost upon us and I can’t wait. I have so many new books and things I want to read over the holidays. Of course, I probably won’t manage to read everything as I also have the goals of getting two papers out, and I will have to prepare classes for next semester, and have do that little look-for-a-job thing, but here’s at least a preliminary list:
(I tried to start over Thanksgiving and got distracted, but I hear such great things)
(h/t @mfbellemare)
Don’t forget to vote today! For those in PA, remember that they can ask you for your photo ID, but you don’t have to provide it (unless you’re voting at a particular location for the first time–but even then, it doesn’t have to be photo ID, just the voter registration card they sent you in the mail.)
I didn’t get a sticker. So I’m just making sure to say it loud and clear here: I voted!
Thanks to those who came before me who worked so I (and others) have this right.
I am a Labor Economist with interests in gender, families, and violence. I am currently in a visiting position at Gettysburg College and am on the 2012-2013 Economics Job Market. I will be attending and available for interviews at the ASSA/AEA meetings in January in San Diego, California. More information about me and my research, including current CV, can be found on my economics blog and personal website.
I have to admit that I don’t entirely understand the Supreme Court ruling today. Lots of people are concentrating on Roberts joining the “liberals”, which is semantically frustrating, but that’s not what I’m confused about.
This part about the expansion of Medicare is what I find perplexing, and perhaps someone can explain. If Congress is allowed to expand Medicare, but not allowed to coerce states into accepting the expansion by threatening to take away their funds, doesn’t that mean that Congress doesn’t have the power to amend legislation to meet the current need? What is it about Medicare that says states were guaranteed access to a certain flavor of coverage in perpetuity? Surely I’m missing something. Didn’t we do essentially the same thing with raising the drinking age?
It’s been a crazy week for the Supreme Court, for sure. I like the Maddow Blog’s breakdown. Short, simple, sweet. Though there’s tons more about it all over the place, including fellow economists Don Taylor of Duke (written here, on TV earlier link) and Harold Pollack of U Chicago at TNR.
Update: The Incidental Economist starts to get at my question, but not really. As does SCOTUSblog. Maybe I’m asking the wrong thing…
My short course this week at CU’s pop center was incredible and exhausting and incredibly exhausting. The easiest part, for me, was thinking about spatial models using matrix algebra, if that’s any indication of what we did all week. I’m fairly certain I forgot how to write STATA code and learned just enough R and GeoDa to be dangerous, but you can bet that’s not the last of me.
Next week should bring to fruition ideas and blog posts that have been percolating: teen pregnancy, more spatial econometrics (separately, although, that gives me an idea…), and some 1720s finance, as well as back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Have a safe and happy holiday weekend!
Right now, this blog is a placeholder. I’ve been thinking of changing my primary blog to this one, but for now, you can find most of my musings at http://loveandotherirrationaltonics.wordpress.com. My students are blogging as well. You can find what we are doing in my Economics 350: Quantitative Methods class on http://fletcherecon350.wordpress.com.
Thanks for stopping by!
ERIN K. FLETCHER 