Category: Uncategorized

It is not uncommon for the New York Times to discuss food policy. It is much less common for the newspaper of record to discuss Food Policy, the Elsevier journal I have the honor of co-editing, along with my Mario Mazzocchi. Yet the Gray Lady did just that last week when it discussed food labeling:

The Senate could soon join the House to try to make it harder for consumers to know what is in their food by prohibiting state governments from requiring the labeling of genetically modified foods. This is a bad idea that lawmakers and the Obama administration should oppose. …

There is no harm in providing consumers more information about their food. A study published in the journal Food Policy in 2014 found that labels about genetic modification did not influence what people thought about those foods. Some companies are deciding on their own to increase the information they provide to consumers without fear of losing sales.

A few conversations with colleagues who teach econometrics have convinced me that, for all the advanced technical knowledge we impart students in standard econometrics classes, we often don’t do a very good job of teaching them how to interpret what they are estimating. This is generally the reason why I teach a graduate class on the practice of econometrics (i.e., so-called cookbook econometrics class) every other year.

More specifically, this leads me to discussing the interpretation of certain types of coefficients for this week’s installment of ‘Metrics Mondays. Beyond the (accurate) interpretation of coefficients, I don’t have a grand overarching theme, so what follows is a collection of bullet points more than anything.

Jeff Bloem, whose initial post caused me to write my own post a few weeks ago about whether more academics should blog, forwarded my post to a colleague of mine and mentor of his at MSU. My colleague was kind enough to cc me on his reply to Jeff:

Thanks for sending! I disagree with Marc at the margin. He has a good point that there’s an important self-selection factor that no doubt gives an upward bias to the effect of blogging on careers …

But my gut says that Marc misses one important point: There is a generational bias effect too. Few from my generation are blogging, yet some could do so well. Our colleague [Redacted] is a frenetic emailer. Had he started his career 20 years later, I suspect he would be blogging and have a meaningful following. …

My response, in which I make a point (in bold) I don’t see often in discussions of whether academics should blog: