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Doug Campbell Profile picture
Doug Campbell
@TradeandMoney
Academic economist, AP New Economic School; UC Davis PhD. Replication. Founder of Insight Prediction.
Oct 14 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Hate to be the downer here who notes that these guy's most famous academic work on institutions didn't hold up to any real scrutiny. Also, Acemoglu's large textbook on models of economic growth didn't include a single non-obvious insight about economic growth itself. Although the note from the Nobel on this prize doesn't cite any papers by name, the language they use clearly alludes to this paper: Two things the authors make clear in that paper is that they don't understand the malthusian model, or Diamond/Crosby.economics.mit.edu/sites/default/…
May 28 • 45 tweets • 9 min read
How credible was the "credibility revolution"? How robust is empirical research in economics? We just replicated a year's worth of the American Economic Review & had economists predict robustness. Here's what we learned. econstor.eu/handle/10419/2… Neil deGrasse Tyson on the essence of science: "You have a hypothesis, you test it. I get a result. A rival of mine double checks it, because they think I might be wrong…" However, in academic economics, there is not much double checking. So we do it.
Jan 6 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
The problem with academia is actually not plagiarism. In economics, a secret that academics closely guard is that most research is invalid or useless for various reasons. Most economists know this, but they are careerists, and so pretend otherwise. (There are also many who actually believe the majority of research, and few realize the extent to which academic research can be fraudulent.)
Jan 5, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Interesting thread. My thesis is that three relatively obvious factors likely over-predict the decline in male labor force participation in the US during this period. Who among my followers can name the three things? There were some very good takes. I think the first big one is the rise in women's labor force participation. Even using state and local data, one get's a clear negative, if modest elasticity of male employment w.r.t. female employment. This was mostly a factor up until 2000.
Jan 5, 2023 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
I finally read Ulysses S. Grant's autobiography for the first time. I highly recommend. For me it was a particularly engrossing reading given my own close following of the Russia-Ukraine war. Here are some takeaways. (1/15) gutenberg.org/files/4367/436… I was really impressed not only with the brilliance behind some complicated maneuvering in, i.e., the Vicksburg campaign, but with the compassion with which he treated the confederate soldiers who surrendered at Vicksburg. He let them go even with their side-arms. (2/15)
Jan 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Super interesting WSJ article about how Putin is fed biased information. wsj.com/articles/putin… Even if none of the details of this article are correct, it's clear this is what is happening. Given the Kremlin's rhetoric and the stakes, Russia is barely spending money on the war really. Nickle and diming soldiers. Not supplying them adequately. Attacking when should defend.
Mar 27, 2022 • 25 tweets • 11 min read
@StatModeling has a nice post with some of our correspondence over the years about the Geno-economics literature & a more recent replication. Andrew has so much content that he typically has a backlog of content about six months long! #Econtwitter statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/03/26/453… Here was the original post, on a replication I did in grad school of a QJE paper. After coding up the data, I reversed the results in just one regression: by adding controls for latitude and sub-Saharan Africa in a cross-country income regression. statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/12/19/a-r…
Mar 26, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Sad news. This is one of my favorite Russian-language singers. I didn't even know he was Ukrainian! One of his songs is one of my all-time favorites, and beloved by Russians. Another great song.
Mar 19, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Horrendous anti-gambling Slow Boring article. Among the arguments are that education spending is bad!?!, and an implicit assumption that additional tax revenue is simply wasted. I didn't expect this from a @mattyglesias edited publication. slowboring.com/p/gambling?s=r If those implicit assumptions are true then why shouldn't the government spend much less money on K-12 education, and why shouldn't we dramatically reduce tax and gov't spending? Certainly taxing capital gains and labor income has worse effects than taxing gambling?
Mar 16, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Although I agree inflation is "too high", and the Fed should probably raise rates, it's quite alarming that most recessions since 1970 in the US have been tightly correlated with rising oil prices. One way to interpret this is that it's a failure of monetary policy. Image Rising oil prices, by itself, should not be a reason for a central bank to tighten to the extent that it causes a recession. The Fed should go it slow. But, this could also be another reason to rethink our dependence on oil, and more to less cyclical green energy.
Jan 4, 2022 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Some bad news today, as the @CFTC (@CFTCquintenz) has shut down polymarket. While I think it is perfectly reasonable that prediction markets should register with the government, I think this case was in fact against the public interest. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… The first is the randomness. Dodgy offshore bookies, such as MyBookie and GT Bets, and other sites like Augur have long existed and taken equivalent bets to what Polymarket has offered. The CFTC has done nothing to any of these sites. Why did they act for this new site?
Apr 3, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I think it's good policy to lay down predictions, and takes guts. I could be wrong but while a 4th wave appears to be starting in the US, I think it will be short-lived, & quite modest compared to December, particularly in terms of deaths. Cases might go up a bit more, but it will turn into, at worst, a "case-demic". The US is likely to have over 150million people at least partially vaccinated by the end of April. And the vaccines appear to work on the variants. Plus better weather provides a modest headwind.
Apr 3, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
So, the Pfizer news from yesterday sounded really great. But, I was confused why they reported effectiveness vs. the South African variant but not for the Brazil variants. wsj.com/articles/pfize… Recall, the South American sample in the Pfizer study was much larger than the South African sample. How is it their data says nothing about the Brazilian variants, w/ 10 times the sample size in South America (counting Argentina)?
Feb 15, 2021 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
It looks like my paper w/ Karsten Mau is now published in ReSTUD. I had written a thread on our paper here: I see the authors have written a partial response. However, I'm not persuaded. We've already written a thorough response-to-the-response here: dropbox.com/s/8yn8woym7qw5…
Feb 13, 2021 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
I just wasted my morning watching the stimulus debate between @LHSummers and @paulkrugman. It's crazy Summers was ever influential. 1/ First, Summers concedes the 2009 stimulus was too small. He then tries to whitewash his own complicity by blaming Congress for shrinking the package slightly. But, it was he himself who advised to kneecap the package before sending it to Congress. 2/
Jan 25, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Excellent @mattyglesias article on Human Challenge Trials. slowboring.com/p/the-case-for… A few things he doesn't mention is that the Stage 3 trials only took around two months to reach statistical significance and could have been approved in early Oct. instead of mid-December, particularly minus the 5-6 week data review by the FDA.
Jan 22, 2021 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Re: Pfizer vaccine. It's clear something big happens around day 11. Nothing of import happens around day 32. #firstdosesfirst Image Pfizer does a ridiculous time split when they look at one shot vs. two. First, there's no statistically significant difference in the first 7 days after the 2nd shot. Had they used an 11 day cut-off instead, one shot would clearly have won. Image
Jul 6, 2020 • 36 tweets • 9 min read
Good news! I just got my first "Top 5" journal publication, in the Review of Economic Studies. Top 5 journals in econ are fetishized beyond belief. This publication helps show why we might want a more balanced attitude. #Econtwitter ideas.repec.org/p/abo/neswpt/w… In our paper, we find several coding errors which overturn a seminal paper in the "Chinese competition caused a huge increase in innovation" lit by Bloom et al (BDvR). From the beginning, I knew the BDvR paper had problems. Why? nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/…
May 5, 2020 • 114 tweets • 24 min read
A bit of good news, after 19 submissions spanning six years, two months, two weeks, and four days, my job market paper on the collapse in US manufacturing has been accepted for publication in the European Economic Review. Here's a thread on the topic. 1/ The original title was "Relative Prices, Hysteresis, and the Decline of American Manufacturing", which later got shortened, with the most recent draft up on Ideas/Repec here: ideas.repec.org/p/cfr/cefirw/w… 2/
Jun 5, 2019 • 21 tweets • 9 min read
It's official, the Review of Economic Studies does not accept comment papers (unless they point out actual factual errors), according to my correspondence with an editor. In important ways, it's not really an academic journal. @RevEconStud #EconTwitter #EconReplicationCrisis This isn't hard. If the RESTud doesn't accept comment papers, then people who do publish there now have an incentive to sneak papers past the referees which are obviously flawed. And people don't have incentive to replicate papers, since they cannot be published. #EconTwitter