Dale and Krueger have responded to Robin Hanson at his blog, which commented on their most recent paper. I’ve also commented on this paper, here. Most of Dale and Krueger’s comments relate to the stability of estimates that suggest that women earn less after attending high-SAT Colleges. I don’t see particularly compelling evidence here either […]

One of the topics I’ve covered here is the all-important issue of whether your choice in College matters in terms of your future earnings. To recap: the best research in the field until a few days ago suggested that the returns to going to a more selective College were quite large; a result which was […]

The New York Times highlights the issue of hospitals opting not to hire smokers. It’s not clear how many places of employment are really banning smoking (or even how strictly such regulations will be enforced), but certainly there have at least been some high-profile cases (ie, Cleveland Clinic). One question that comes immediately to mind […]

Just some pointers. Dr. Daniel MacArthur has put up a guest post where I outline my own experience with personal genomics. Cool times that we live in. Also, Zack Ajmal has started posting higher K’s of HAP participants. He’s now in the second batch. My parents will be in the third. Lots of Tamils and […]

It’s called Razib on Books. I posted the rationale over at Discover Blogs. Basically a way for me to organize past content which new readers are not aware of.

Governments are large or small depending on the level of trust and civic attitudes people have for one another. These attitudes shape peoples’ taste for redistribution and public ownership, and also affect the quality of governance. This position has been advanced by a large literature; most recently in this interesting paper put out by IZA. […]

Zack has finally started posting results from HAP. To the left you see the results generated at K = 5 from his merged data set with the first 10 HAP members. I am HRP002. Zack is HRP001. Paul G., who is an ethnic Assyrian, is HRP010. Some others have already “outed” themselves, so I could […]

Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff famously argued that patterns of growth across the Americas can be traced back to historic levels of inequality. Natural factor endowments in certain areas (for instance, Caribbean islands) encouraged rent-seeking extraction over investments in human capital, and led to the political empowerment of rich landowners. These elites, in turn, created […]