There are good reasons to believe it does.
At least, that is the answer my coauthor Ken Lee and I come up with in a new article titled “Look Who’s Talking: The Impacts of the Intrahousehold Allocation of Mobile Phones on Agricultural Prices,” forthcoming in the Journal of Development Studies.
More specifically, in a sample of onion farmers in the Philippines, we look at whether there is a statistically significant relationship between whether anyone in a household owns a mobile phone and the price received by that household for its onions.
Failing to find any statistically significant association between the two, we then look at whether there is a statistically significant relationship between whether (i) the household head owns a mobile phone, (ii) the household head’s spouse owns a mobile phone, or (iii) any of the children in the household own a mobile phone and the price received by that household for its onions.
Openness, or: Reason #353 Why I Blog
Andrew Gelman nicely summarizes an important reason why he blogs — and, incidentally, why I blog, too:
2. Openness: In a blog I can write about the limitations of my work. It’s a real challenge to discuss limitations in a scholarly article, as we’re always looking over our shoulder at what referees might think. Sure, sometimes I can get away with writing “Survey weighting is a mess,” but my impression is that most scholarly articles are relentlessly upbeat. Sort of like how a magazine article typically will have a theme and just plug it over and over. In a blog we can more easily admit uncertainty.
More here.
I feel as though that reason is especially important in
economicsthe social sciences, where one’s salesmanship is often what makes or break one’s papers owing to the fact that readers often make up their minds about the quality of a paper before they reach the end of the introduction. In the sciences, articles are much shorter, and there is a sense that no article is perfect.