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Happy New Year to everyone once again. Here is a quick ‘Metrics Monday post to start the year on the right foot.

Dave Giles had a neat post, sandwiched between Christmas and New Year,  titled “Correlation Isn’t Necessarily Transitive.” If you are not familiar with the concept of transitivity,* what this means is that when Y is correlated with D, and D is correlated with Z, Y isn’t necessarily correlated with Z.

From my choice of labels for those variables, you have probably guess why this is matters for applied econometrics: It is perfectly possible that in a regression of Y on D where you are interested in the causal relationship flowing from D to Y, you have an otherwise valid instrument Z (i.e., a variable that is plausibly exogenous to outcome Y and which is also relevant in explaining D). Obviously, Z being relevant means that it is correlated with D. Assuming that D is also correlated with Y, the fact that correlation isn’t necessarily transitive means that the IV is not necessarily correlated with the outcome.

December 31 marked the fifth anniversary of this blog, so on top of wishing Happy New Year to all, I am also wishing this site Happy Blog Anniversary!*

December 31 also marked the close of this blog’s most successful year ever: Between 2014 and 2015, the number of page views almost doubled, increasing by 94.6 percent for a total of 134,951 page views coming from 79,710 visitors in 2015. (This is in no small part thanks to Mark Thoma‘s generous linking to my posts from his own blog Economist’s View, which anyone with an interest in economics should read.)

My top 5 posts of 2015 were, in descending order of popularity:

From my colleague Paul Glewwe:

In the spring of 2016, the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota will host the 13th Midwest International Economic Development Conference (MIEDC) on Friday, May 6, and Saturday, May 7, 2016, at the McNamara Alumni Center on the University of Minnesota. The guest speaker will be Michael Kremer, Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

We invite you, and any other interested faculty and graduate students in your department or elsewhere, to submit a paper to present at the conference. Papers on any topic related to international economic development are welcome. Submissions for an entire session (of 3 papers) are also welcome. Abstracts without papers will not be considered.

Deadline for submissions is January 6, 2016. Papers will be reviewed by a committee from the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin – Madison. You will be notified by January 31, 2016 whether your paper has been accepted.

Questions about submissions, contact: Paul Glewwe (pglewwe@umn.edu)

Submit papers to: Sadie Brendalen (will1945@umn.edu)

Information regarding the conference, including registration is now available at https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/miedc/home