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Josh Angrist and Steve Pischke have a new book coming out in a few weeks titled Mastering ‘Metrics. From Dave Giles’ blog, which is one of my three* favorite econ blogs:

Mastering ‘Metrics: The Path From Cause to Effect, by Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke, is to be published by Princeton University Press later this month. This new book from the authors of Mostly Harmless Econometrics is bound to be well received by students and researchers involved in applied empirical economics. My guess is that the biggest accolades will come from those whose interest is in empirical microeconomics.

…

Apparently the book focuses on:

The five most valuable econometric methods, or what the authors call the Furious Five – random assignment, regression, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity designs, and differences in differences.

I know what I’m getting myself for Christmas–and I suspect this new book will rapidly become one of the core texts in my cookbook econometrics class, alongside Angrist and Pischke’s earlier book Mostly Harmless Econometrics.

* The other two being Development Impact (development economics) and Jayson Lusk’s blog (agricultural economics and food policy).

The Graduate Students Association of the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell had invited me to talk last Friday about how academic economists can use social media to promote their research.

Here are my slides for that talk, in which I explain why I tweet and blog, and provide some tips for those who are thinking about doing the same.

Speaking of the Dyson School’s graduate students, some of them have just started a new blog on international development called Economics that Really Matters, in a nod to Theodore Schultz’s 1979 Nobel lecture. I highly recommend that you check it out if you have an interest agriculture, development, and food policy. You can check it out here.

Fellow agricultural and applied economist Matt Bogard had a very nice post last weekend discussing my own post last month on the cookbook approach to econometrics:

It is the gap between theory and practice [of econometrics] that has given me a ton of grief in the last few years. After spending hours and hours in graduate school working through tons of theorems and proofs to basically restate everything I learned as an undergraduate in a more rigorous tone, I found that when it came to actually doing econometrics I wasn’t much the better, or sometimes wondered if maybe I even regressed. [Note: Ha! – MFB.] At every corner was a different challenge that seemed at odds with everything I learned in grad school. Doing econometrics felt like running in water. As Peter Kennedy states in the applied econometrics chapter of his popular A Guide to Econometrics, “econometrics is much easier without data.” As Angrist and Pischke state: “if applied econometrics were easy theorists would do it.”