Right in the Short Run

There seems to be a lot of recent backlash against “cuteness” in economics paper. Steve Levitt and Ulrike Malmendier, in particular, have taken a lot of heat. So has Emily Oster. In his April 2nd article at The New Republic entitled “How Freakonomics is Ruining the Dismal Science”, Noam Scheiber identifies a “cleverness problem” in economics, arguing that students in the premier economics departments in the US end up playing an “academic parlor game”.

Several thoughts on the matter.

First, there seems to be an assumption that “cute” papers lack academic value. Certainly Levitt’s bagel and donut research led to his investigation about the (lack of) profit maximization by “legit” firms such as airlines. Similarly, Malmendier and DellaVigna’s research on gym memberships offer methodological insights from the perspective of psych and econ. The point is, “cute” research may allow us to learn important fundamental points about more “important” issues. As Matthew Rabin pointed out, decades ago there was short paper about used cars that was chastised for being “cute”.

Second, it isn’t obvious to me that “sexy data-set” papers cannot tackle big issues. Consider Ted Miguel’s utilization of rain as an instrument for income to analyze the relationship between income and civil unrest. Hardly a “small issue”! Now Scheiber also levies a criticism at Oster’s work about hepatitis B and missing women, citing “a snot-nosed grad student from Berkeley [who] pointed out that hepatitis B couldn’t possibly explain the missing women problem”. Fair point, I suppose (I admittedly have not read either papers), but the subject of her research obviously wasn’t a parlor game. Even if she was wrong, at least criticisms levied against her paper help strengthen the point that “Sen feared: [that] people were taking dramatic steps to avoid ending up with two girls”. Female infanticide ain’t no small issue!

In any case, people much much smarter than me have commented extensively on this article. For instance, see Marginal Revolution’s take and subsequent comments.