Policy and academic macro

Academics are in their ivory tower and have little real world or policy impact. That is the view that is often conveyed by those who do not know what those academics are up to. It is also a common justification by policymakers for ignoring any advice coming from academia. I have lamented many times that politicians routinely disregard advice from scientists (including economists), particularly by focusing law-making on the means instead of on the goals. That said, I recently mentioned work that argued that Keynesian policies will always appeal more to policymakers than Hayekian ones, because it gives them a reason to do something in times of crisis.

Michel De Vroey compares rather Lucas to Keynes. Lucasian macroeconomics relies a lot on internal consistency. This disciplines the theory a lot, but this acts also a straitjacket that in unappealing to policy makers. Keynesian theory has a lot more hand-waving regarding consistency but seems to have an answer for everything because it can cut corners (even if answers may turn out to be wrong). The fact that it appears to be so flexible and know-it-all (like those "economists" that are willing to answer any question journalists may have, I would add) makes Keynesian theory a magnet for policymakers, especially in terms of crisis. And this is why, with the last recession, macroeconomics has been declared to be in crisis, because it listened to Lucas and not Keynes for three decades and did not always immediately have answers.

This is an argument written by someone in the ivory tower. Contrast this with someone involved in policymaking. The very recent interview of James Bullard seems to say the exact opposite. Policymakers, at least monetary policymakers, are very much looking at Lucasian theory for help. In his words, "there is still no substitute for heavy technical analysis to get to the bottom of these issues" (speaking of the financial crisis) and that is happening with structural, internally consistent modeling. Hand-waving does not cut it. And I agree.

Lack of transparency at the American Economic Association

I have complained several times on this blog about how the American Economic Association is run, particularly how its executive and committees are constituted almost exclusively of faculty from the very top universities, and mostly private universities, see the current slate of officers (Past posts: 1, 2, 3, 4). This lack of representation leads to apparent nepotism in the distribution of awards, and this can lead to suspicions of the same for acceptances to its annual meeting program (especially the printed, unrefereed proceedings) and to its journals. I have called in the past to write in at the elections a candidate that does not fit the profile of current AEA officers, but rather a common member of the association. But the AEA has only announced the winner of the election, with no vote tally. As this does not look very transparent, I enquired with the AEA Secretary-Treasurer, Peter Rousseau, whom I asked about full election results and how they are certified. Here is what he answered:

The long-standing policy of the AEA in reporting election results is to report only names of those elected. This policy was re-visited by the Executive Committee several years ago. The minutes of that meeting state:

"A member requested that the number of votes for each candidate in the annual election of officers be reported publicly. Current policy is for the Secretary-Treasurer and Administrative Director to certify the vote counts, which are tabulated electronically, and to report only the names of the successful candidates. After an interesting economic and psychological analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of reporting individual vote counts, it was decided to retain the Association's policy of reporting only the qualitative outcome of the annual election of officers."

The bylaws clearly state that the Secretary certifies the results. Please be assured that it is my fiduciary responsibility to the membership as its agent to report those qualitative results accurately.

Thank you for supporting the AEA and its mission of encouraging economic research worldwide.

So it is the very executive committee that is suspect of inbreeding that is at the origin of this policy of obfuscation of the election results. And it is a member of the executive committee, the unelected Secretary, that certifies election results and only releases part of them. This is how dictators run sham elections.

What kind of jobs are academic scholars looking for?

Any university ranking that is published these days features a majority of US-based schools at the top. It is clear that across every field the United States is able to attract the best talent, at least when looking at top schools. Why is that so? What attracts scholars to the US?

Jürgen Janger and Klaus Nowotny have created an interesting data set by surveying 10,000 academics across the world and letting them choose between various hypothetical jobs. Those jobs varied along a series of characteristics, which allows to understand what academics value most. The results indicate that the standard US tenure track system is pretty much close to optimal. What matters most is pay, which should have a performance component, valuable peers, internal grants and a good mix of teaching and research. Location does not matter much, presumably because academicians are so focused on their work. Those early in their careers value financial and intellectual autonomy, as well as having some prospect for internal promotion based on performance. The more senior ones do not like being bound to a particular research stream and prefer being in a departmental setup rather than a chair-like system. Given all this, it is no surprise that the US manages to attract the best talent. But one can wonder whether the responses also reflect the realization that the United States has attracted the best researchers, so its system must be better independently from personal preferences.

About exploding offers

The academic job market is characterized by much uncertainty about the job candidates, at least in Economics where students who have yet to publish anything (in most cases) and have not even completed their studies are hired. The fact that they are supposed to be at the research frontier and that very few people, if any, can evaluate their potential makes it no surprise that recruiting committees stick to signals: who the dissertation adviser is, where the degree is from, and always glowing recommendation letters. When a recruiter has managed to identify a particularly good candidate, it does not want to let others benefit from this discovery. To avoid the job candidate from continuing to shop around, the typical strategy is to make an exploding offer: The offer letter is valid for, say, a week, and thereafter becomes void. This is quite frustrating for a candidate who may still be waiting for a preferred department to make its move, but this is well proven strategy for recruiting departments.

Mark Armstrong and Jidong Zhou show that this does not necessarily have to be so. Other options are to let candidates make a down-payment to keep a job offer alive or offer a bonus if they sign quickly (I am reinterpreting the papers results for my example). Yet, I do not think I have ever seen this happen, even a signing bonus. The model, which is actually about a seller who may offer a buy-now discount, ask for a deposit or make an exploding offer, highlights that the uncertainty about the outside options of the buyer (or the job candidate) is crucial. The search wants to deter the buyer from looking elsewhere. How much the uncertainty affects the buyer determines which strategy is best. In the case of the academic market, I guess this means that job candidates are very risk averse, thus the exploding offer strategy is optimal for the recruiters.

Top Economics graduate programs are not as good as you think

Along with business schools, Economics is where pedigree matters most in the placement of PhD students to academic positions. Students from top ranked (or considered such) programs have a job almost guaranteed in research universities, and students from lower ranked universities find it very hard to break into such universities no matter what their performance is. In part, this is due to the fact that we tend to hire faculty fresh out of graduate school, while other fields go first through post-docs, and that publication delays imply that graduating students have typically no publication. Thus one has to rely on reputations only (or actually read their papers, but then are you going to read the papers of all students from lower ranked programs?).

John Conley and Ali Sina Onder find that while there is indeed a steep gradient across program rankings, there is an even steeper gradient within programs. They use student rankings within programs and cohorts and their publication output after six years, that is, when they are up for tenure. Looking at AER equivalents, they find that the top Toronto student is equivalent to the number three from Berkeley, for example. And to illustrate how steep the gradient is, the median Harvard student has after six years only 0.04 AER equivalent publications, despite coming from the #2 program. This means that more than half of Harvard students are not tenurable in any research-oriented institution.

I see two major conclusions from this: 1) Stop worrying so much about where PhD students are graduating from. It is OK to hire students from lower ranked programs as long as they excelled in those programs. 2) Even the top places should acknowledge that not all students should take research positions and need to prepare them for other ones, like industry, government or purely teaching jobs. These students are screwed twice: they are sent to tenure-track positions that they will never get tenure in, and they are woefully unprepared for the jobs they should take.

AEA elections are on, you know for whom to vote

As explained in a previous post, write in Gregory Burge for every slot in the AEA executive, and no one else.

The AEA executive is still not representative

A year ago, I modestly called on the AEA to open its ranks officers to those who are not at (mostly private) elite universities. They are not representative of the profession, as many of us work at lower ranked research universities, liberal arts colleges, government, industry and think tanks. They all deserve some representation as their interests differ quite a bit from big shots with almost guaranteed grants and easy access to top journals and conferences.

At the time, I suggested to write in Gregory Burge (link corrected) on the election ballot. As the AEA did not disclose election results (if it did, please tell me where), I have no idea whether it had any impact. I suggest to try again this year. Last year, I posted about this when I got the ballot, which may have been too late. This year, I make the call earlier, so that more people can adjust their vote. Indeed, the candidates this year are:

For President-elect:
Richard Thaler, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

For Vice-Presidents:
David Card, University of California, Berkeley
Judith Chevalier, Yale School of Management
N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard University
Jeffrey Wooldridge, Michigan State University

For Executive Committee:
Dora Costa, University of California, Los Angeles
Guido Imbens, Stanford Graduate School of Business
David Laibson, Harvard University
John Williams, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

While there is at least someone for a non-university environment and three candidates from public universities, which is an encouragement, this is still far from representative. Vote for Gregory Burge (write-in) for every position.

Why should we debate the contributions of particular dead economists?

Pier Luigi Porta reports that there is currently a lively debate on the legacy of Piero Sraffa's research and its contribution to modern economics, all this in conjunction with the opening of Sraffa's archives twenty years ago. Sraffa's major work was published half a century ago, and it influence economic thinking back then. But Economics moved on, we found new techniques, models and evidence. What is the purpose of going back to outdated theories? I realize that sometimes you need to take a few steps back when you realize you got into a dead-end, but that does not mean one should worship old science and look for its traces everywhere.

There are, however, circumstances where the history of economic thought is useful. For example, there certainly are some fads in economic research and it would be useful to learn how they emerge. Fads are a waste of time and should be prevented. It can also be useful to understand how some people can lead economic thinking onto a particular path, especially when there are some self-interests attached (and the path turns out to be a dead-end). But this is more about group psychology than hero worship.

Maybe someone can help me understanding why we need this debate about the importance of Sraffa in current economic thinking. I do not see it.

Department size and research productivity

This is a bit late for the current job market for Economics PhDs, but say you have to choose among several job offers (lucky you). The departments are are all of equal prestige and working conditions, salary, and geographic environment are all comparable. The only difference is the size of the faculty. What offer should you take if you care about your future research output?

Clément Bosquet and Pierre-Philippe Combes say you should go for the uniformly good, more field diverse, and larger department. At least this applies to French academic economists. Even more interesting, they observe that department characteristics are as important as researcher characteristics. The initial placement of a researcher thus matters a lot for her future, and this may explain why there are so few success stories after an initially poor placement, at least in Economics. Of course, the academic market in France is very different from any other country, so I am not sure the results can generalize, but this is a start.

Test statistics and the publication game

It is well known that journals do not like replications or confirmations of hypotheses. They are looking for the empirical results that contradict popular wisdom, and this must be influencing the way researchers look for test results. To increase your chances of success, you want to only mention highly significant results and ignore the so-so ones.

Abel Brodeur, Mathias Lé, Marc Sangnier and Yanos Zylberberg look at the distribution of p-values in articles published in the top three economics journals. I am not quite sure what the distribution of p-values would be if the publication process were unbiased, but it would probably look like a Poisson distribution and it would be monotonic on each side of the mode. What the authors find does not look at all like this. There is a distinct lack of test results that just miss the 5% or 10% significance, and distinctively more that just pass those thresholds, making the distribution bimodal. Interestingly, this problem is less present when stars are not used to highlight significance or when the authors are tenured.

These results indicate that there is more than a selection bias. This is an inflation bias by the researcher when he only presents the most significant results, which were obtained by finding the specification that allows to pass the magic significance thresholds. I do not think this is ethical, but the publishing game makes it unavoidable, so the profession is apparently fine with it. I guess we have to tolerate this and take it into account when reading papers much like we know there is grade inflation when looking at transcripts or there is similar inflation when reading recommendation letters.

PS: This paper is a strong candidate for the best paper title of the year. Bravo!

PS2: What is really unethical is claiming results are significant when they are not. The case of Ulrich Lichtenthaler comes to mind, who added "significance stars" to his results when they were not warranted. The fact that he still managed to publish widely is an indictment of the quality of research in business journals, too.

Are economists really uneasy about studying inequality?

Economists are often misunderstood. People do not understand what we do. They think we spend all our time forecasting the stock market. And the whole profession has been accused of not foreseeing the recent recession. Some economists have redirected this criticism and made a name for themselves by complaining that economic models do not take this or that into account. That is true, but this is often irrelevant, as models are abstractions and they cannot take everything into account. You want to build the right model for the particular question at hand. I have mentioned a few of those essays on this blog, in part because they frustrate me as they are ignoring the very literature they are calling for. There is a lot more to Economics than the principles with perfect markets we tend to teach as an introduction to the field.

The latest paper to frustrate me is by Brendan Markey‐Towler and John Foster. They claim the Economics profession is uncomfortable with issues about inequality to the point of ignoring them. To support this, they quote extensively from the introduction of the Handbook of Economic Inequality, which of course is going to try to make the case that inequality is underrepresented in the literature. Why so? Markey-Towler and Foster claim this has to do with the profession's adherence to Arrow-Debreu markets, welfare theorems, the Hicks-Kaldor efficiency-equity trade-off, and Arrow's impossibility theorem. Because the profession is so enamored in these theorems, it views the impact of inequality to be political only, but of no economic consequence. Never mind that you can still have inequality in such economies. Never mind that every issue of the top journals has papers with such properties and inequality. Never mind that many papers go through great lengths in trying to model observed inequality while studying many issues. I agree not every paper does this, far from this, but then not every answer hinges on inequality. Again, models are an abstraction, and one cannot include everything. One keeps what is most likely to matter. Occam's razor is still valid today.

Markey-Towler and Foster have this distorted and unfortunately common view that economists believe markets are always complete and perfect, and thus inequality cannot happen. This sounds a lot like those who criticize Economics after taking one class, where they learned that free markets and free trade are good. But economists have long realized that things are much more complicated than that, and the study of the departures from this perfect world dominates current research in Economics. In fact, read this blog and you should see that I hardly mention such perfect markets. The authors' solution? Complex systems theory, which I liken to modeling the actors of an economy being linked by a giant plumbing system with leaks, plugs and bottlenecks. That sounds much like the frictions, information asymmetries and imperfect competition we put in our models, except that complex systems theory is much more detailed, requires gigantic amounts of data to calibrate or estimate, and has gone nowhere so far. So researchers had to resort to heroic assumptions to show something could happen, without any ability to validate it empirically.

I do not think this is the way to go, and we can agree to disagree on that. But I take offense at the idea that economists are somehow uncomfortable, even scared of dealing with inequality. That is just not true.

The Harvard Economics Department's Nobel problem

By all accounts, the Economics Department at Harvard University is the best department in world, to the point that it gets an almost perfect score on RePEc. Yet, despite such dominance, anyone on its faculty has not received a Nobel prize in a very long time. The last Harvard faculty with a Nobel, Amartya Sen, was hired five years after his 1999 Nobel Prize. The 1998 Prize, Robert Merton, was at the Business School. You have to go all the way back to Wassily Leontief in 1973 to find the next one.

What is the department's problem? One, it could be that it is populated with brilliant people, but the the exceptional ones who merit Nobel Prizes. Two, it could be that the standing of the department in the profession is overvalued. Three, it could be that the rankings are biased in some way, say that Harvard graduates like to cite their mentors. Four, maybe there is some curse.

The 2012 prize is going to be announced tomorrow. Which Harvard Economics faculty have a shot? The most cited economist is Andrei Shleifer. But his unethical behavior makes it impossible for him to get the prize. Robert Barro is also extremely well cited, but his citations are very often about proving him wrong. Alvin Roth is a serious candidate, but just left for Stanford (because of the curse?). Martin Weitzman is a candidate, but if environmental economics gets it, it should first go to William Nordhaus alone. That leaves us, in my mind with only three viable candidates: Oliver Hart, Elhanan Helpman and Martin Feldstein. Given the long list of viable candidates (say, Tirole, Milgrom, Paul Romer, Lars Hansen, Thaler, Robert Wilson, Nordhaus, Holmstrom, Fama, Dixit, Roth, Kiyotaki, Moore, Newhouse, Grossman, Ross, Rabin, Atkinson, Deaton, Shiller, Berry), the odds remain small.

Mathematics, Econometrics and the top economist's career outcomes

Some people have been complaining about the increasing mathematization of econonmics and how it leads to a disconnect of economics with real life (which I suppose is void of mathematics). I would argue that this is actually a good thing, first because it forces you to have rigorous arguments, second because you often need quantitative answers to questions that result in qualitatively ambiguous outcomes, and third because it simply allows us to look at more complex problems. But, has mathematization actually increased?

Miguel Espinosa, Carlos Rondon and Mauricio Romero look at the publications of top economists and look at how many equations or econometric outputs per article they produced. The analysis for the last century shows a gradual increase of mathematization throughout, except for the number of equations which went through a serious recession in the 1980's. And of course, econometrics started only seriously in the 1950's. It also appears that professional success as measured by prestigious prizes is certainly linked to the use of mathematics, but not the econometric kind.

Does publishing better pay better in California?

In some countries, academics can be compensated for performance. Some universities provide incentives for good research and/or teaching through bonuses or pay raises. Others may only respond to outside offers, but the end effect is the same: performance compensation responds to market pressure. Or so we would like to think. There is, however, a substantial source of disagreement in how much a particular publication is worth. Everyone has his own ranking in mind, and the correlation among all those is not that high.

John Gibson, David Anderson and John Tressler look at Economics departments in the University of California system. They look at 700 Economics journals and how publication in them translates into tenure, promotion and salary increases. They compare different journal ranking schemes and finding that it is not only the order of journals that matters but also the convexity of the scores: how fast they drop after the top journals. This matter is consequential: the average lifetime output of a UC economist varies between 36 and 144 American Economic Review equivalent pages.

Results show that the statistical fits of various journal ranking schemes to salary outcomes are surprisingly close to each other. I wonder, though, how even more convex ranking schemes would have fared, such as the RePEc journal H-index which is used is several departments (but I am not sure about UC departments). Maybe this was not considered because of endogeneity issues. Another interesting result is that a 10-page article in the AER raises compensation by 1.3%, or US$27,500 in average net present value (neglecting the impact on retirement pensions).

AEA: more of the same

The new electoral ballot for the American Economics Association officers is out, and it is as usual from the old boys network:

For President-elect:
William D. Nordhaus, Yale, PhD MIT

For Vice-Presidents:
John M. Abowd, Cornell, PhD Chicago
Joseph G. Altonji, Yale, PhD Princeton
Raquel Fernandez, NYU, PhD Columbia
Paul R. Milgrom, Stanford, PhD Stanford

For Executive Committee:
Amy M. Finkelstein, MIT, PhD MIT
Jonathan D. Levin, Stanford, PhD MIT
Serena Ng, Columbia, PhD Princeton
Mark D. Watson, Princeton, PhD UCSD

Consider this: one has to point out that for once there is a candidate who got a PhD from a public university. As I mentioned before, I cannot see how these people can in any way or fashion represent the profession, as there is no one from a public university, no one from a liberal arts college, no one from government, no one from private industry, no one without tenure. One does not even have a choice for president! I have a lot of respect for William Nordhaus, but if there is no choice, this election is not about representation or democracy. It is also about credibility.

The ballot allows for write-ins, though. But without coordinated action, nothing can change here. One can attempt this, though. Hence, I suggest to write in for every position Gregory Burge, assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma and PhD from Florida State University. Make it known to the AEA that these shenanigans should stop.

Vote Gregory Burge and vote often!

The under-representation of women at the AEA meetings

There is no secret that women are under-represented in the Economics profession. Things have improved over time, though, but the proportion of women thins considerably as you look further up in the academics ranks. And this is not just a cohort effect coming from the increased proportion of women taking up Economics compared to previous years. Is there still a glass ceiling, despite the huge pressures on departments to hire and promote women?

Rosemary Cunningham and Madeline Zavodny show that one way to look at this is how well women are represented on the program of the annual meeting of the American Economic Association. Again, things have improved over time, but they are still under-represented compared to their numbers in the profession. And this despite the fact that there are sessions essentially reserved for them organized by CSWEP (Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession) and IAFE (International Association of Feminist Economists). The classic argument is that women do not come to the meeting because it is held during a school holiday (very early January), but there is daycare. I would rather argue that it has to do with how the program is put together. As in much of what is going on at the AEA, being part of the old boys network is essential. Very few people from outside are lucky to break through. Women simply do not like taking part in such professional shmoozing, and they are not that welcome either. The fact that it is old people doing the program does not help either.

Are consulting and research substitues or complements?

Think tanks have a horrible reputation everywhere by in the media. The reputation is because they are often very biased and sell out to their funders. The media is because think tank staff are willing to provide the expected sound bites to journalists, no matter what the topic. All this would be OK if think tanks were good at conducting independent research. It turns out the most prominent ones, do not do much of it on the hot topics they talk about, according to Dan Farber, who finds that they do not publish much of relevance (and this is not even considering peer reviewed research).

Interestingly, the picture is very different with respect to consulting. Looking at academics across all fields from five Spanish niversities, Pablo D'Este, Francesco Rentocchini, Liney Manjarrés-Henrìquez and Rosa Grimaldi find that getting grant money is positively associated with getting consulting contracts. In other words, good researchers also get consulting gigs. And in some fields, consulting is where the financial rewards of research really lie, especially in social sciences where grants are usually relatively small.

What is up with Elsevier?

Whether you like it or not, Elsevier matters in the dissemination of research in Economics. By far the largest player in the field, it enjoys considerable market power (and a profit margin around 30% that comes with it). And even though journals are not at the frontier of research in Economics, it still matters what happens at Elsevier because it controls so many of the top field journals.

According to its web page on the global dissemination of research, Elsevier states:

We recognise that access to quality research is vital to the scientific community and beyond. For us this means providing support and the latest tools to maintain the quality and integrity of published scientific literature, achieving the widest dissemination of content, and embracing the opportunities of open access. We will continue to identify access gaps, and work towards ensuring that everyone has access to quality scientific content anytime, anywhere.

These are all nice words, but this is not all what Elsevier practices. First of all, all of the Economics content of Elsevier is gated, and academic libraries have to pay through the nose to let faculty access the content, including their own works. Even errata and retraction notices are gated. There is no open access journal in Economics, and even in other fields where it is available, the cost is prohibitive (usually US$3000, even more with color charges!), which cannot be justified in any reasonable way by hosting costs. Indeed, Elsevier spends considerable resources trying to keep potential readers away, by gating the material for the general public and making it difficult for individuals to buy subscriptions, especially for hard copies. All this management of subscriptions and filtering of web traffic would disappear with open access, making it much cheaper, not more expensive.

But this is not an issue only with Elsevier (Springer is much worse in this respect). Elsevier, with its market power is trying to kill any competition and any initiative that tries to open up the dissemination of research. For example, it was a huge backer of the Research Works Act in the US, which would have prohibited mandates that publicly funded research should be available in open-access repositories. Of course this generated a huge outcry from the scientific community (you know, the one that Elsevier claims to serve) and lead to a call for a boycott. This seems to have been successful, as Elsevier reversed its stance, thereby killing the bill.

Unfortunately, few economists seem to have participated in the boycott, which is probably why Elsevier continues to flaunt the research community with no remorse. For example, it has not updated the listings of its journals for over a year in RePEc, and still vigorously refuses to let RePEc perform citation analysis on its contents. Repeated attempts to get a reaction from Elsevier have unsuccessful from my part. My suspicion is that RePEc is threatening some of the products that Elsevier is pushing (Sciverse, Scopus), and the interest of the research community becomes second fiddle. From what hear, people are deserting the Economics desk at Elsevier, starting with its head, which makes you wonder who is in charge of "the widest dissemination of content."

To understand further what a fine business Elsevier is, here are some of my previous posts:
The evil empire strikes again
The evil empire strikes again (II)
Copyright and the lack of competition in academic publishing
Why I am boycotting Elsevier

How did online journals change the economics literature?

Scientific publication is not the same as it was, now that we can easily access the literature over the Internet. No more trips to the library, much fewer waits for interlibrary loans, and no more chasing who took or misplaced the volume in the racks. But did all this change anything in the way we publish our results?

This is what Timo Boppart and Kevin E. Staub study by looking at the diversity of topics covered in journals and how the availability of on-line publication would have changed that. The idea is that on-line publication allows to discover and read more material, and one may in particular stray away from the usual topics. No doubt about that. But I wonder why Boppart and Straub have this focus on journals. After all, working papers is where its at in Economics, and journal readership has not really increased, I believe. The treatment variable is the share of cited articles available on-line the year before publication. This seems so wrong. There is no way it takes only one year from the literature search to the print issue. Not in Economics, where I would say it is a minimum three years, with really rare cases below that. In fact, a good share of mine took more than a year from final acceptance to actual publication. Then, what about working papers? This is what people read, not articles.

The impact of recessions on economist productivity

In recessions, those who have the hardest time finding jobs are those who try for the first time. Facing these difficulties, many decide to pursue their studies in graduate school. From this, one should expect future productivity to be higher in the future, because of the higher level of human capital. But for a given level of human capital, labor productivity should be lower post-recession, because the marginal new graduate is of lower quality.

Michael Boehm and Martin Watzinger look at the performance of PhD economists and find that those who studied or graduated during a recession over-perform the others as measured by publication records. That would not surprise me for those who graduated during tough times, as only the best get jobs. Indeed, the study matches those who graduated with those who are still members of the American Economic Association. Thus, there is some selection bias. But for those who start in a recession, and thus would graduate in "normal" times, given the average length of a recession, this is more surprising. Boehm and Watzinger can justify this with the good old Roy model of reallocation of talent: in a recession, people switch to recession proof sectors, and those who can do this the most easily are those who are about to choose in which sector to work: students. As the number of graduate students slots does not change much, at least in Economics, the quality of those admitted is higher, if the admission officers do their work well. As the publication record many years later shows, they do.