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Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Published July 16, 2012

Contributing to Public Goods: “How Should a PhD Student Be?,” Part 1 (Updated)

Last week, two of my colleagues and I were invited to a professional development workshop held by the PhD students in the Sanford School of Public Policy on the topic of getting the most out of a PhD.

Specifically, the PhD students wanted to know what we had done (and when) in years 1 to 5 of our doctoral studies, and how we had navigated the process leading to our first publication.

Here are my slides for the workshop, and here is the audio, which you can also stream below. I speak from the beginning until about 16:00, when Nick Carnes takes over. Amar Hamoudi starts at around 28:00.

Continue readingContributing to Public Goods: “How Should a PhD Student Be?,” Part 1 (Updated)
Published July 12, 2012

All Politics Might Be Local, but the Returns to Local Politics Are Frugal

Or at least, the returns from involvement in local politics in China are. From a new working paper by Jian Zhang, John Giles, and Scott Rozelle:

Recruiting and retaining leaders and public servants at the grass-roots level in developing countries creates a potential tension between providing sufficient returns to attract talent and limiting the scope for excessive rent-seeking behavior. In China, researchers have frequently argued that village cadres, who are the lowest level of administrators in rural areas, exploit personal political status for economic gain. Much existing research, however, compares the earnings of cadre and non-cadre households in rural China without controlling for unobserved dimensions of ability that are also correlated with success as entrepreneurs or in non-agricultural activities. The findings of this paper suggest a measurable return to cadre status, but the magnitudes are not large and provide only a modest incentive to participate in village-level government. The paper does not find evidence that households of village cadres earn significant rents from having a family member who is a cadre. Given the increasing returns to non-agricultural employment since China’s economic reforms began, it is not surprising that the returns to working as a village cadre have also increased over time. Returns to cadre-status are derived both from direct compensation and subsidies for cadres and indirectly through returns earned in off-farm employment from businesses and economic activities managed by villages.

For more about local politics in the context of developing countries, I would start with Michael Bratton’s 1980 book The Local Politics of Rural Development and his 1989 article in World Politics, Christian Lund’s 2006 article in Development and Change and his 2010 Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa.

Continue readingAll Politics Might Be Local, but the Returns to Local Politics Are Frugal
Published July 10, 2012

Trivial Confirmations of the Obvious?

An op-ed by Jacqueline Stevens a few weekends ago in the New York Times made a lot of waves. In it, Stevens — a professor in the political science department at Northwestern University — essentially declares herself in favor of eliminating National Science Foundation funding for political science research.

Her reason? Political scientists are lousy forecasters.

This post not going to be a response to Jacqueline Stevens. GWU’s Henry Farrell has a great response here, Stanford’s James Fearon — whose work is singled out by Stevens as the type of work she dislikes — has his own response here, and forecaster extraordinaire Jay Ulfelder responds here.

What I am going to take issue with here instead is a two-sentence excerpt. Indeed, in her op-ed, Stevens writes of empirical research in political science that

Many of today’s peer-reviewed studies offer trivial confirmations of the obvious (…). I look forward to seeing what happens to my discipline and politics more generally once we stop mistaking probability studies and statistical significance for knowledge.

Trivial confirmations of the obvious, really?

Continue readingTrivial Confirmations of the Obvious?