Committee on Honors and Awards
Janet Currie, Chair PhD Princeton
Abhjit Banerjee PhD Harvard Faculty at MIT
Pinelopi Goldberg PhD Stanford
Caroline Hoxby PhD MIT
Vincent Crawford PhD MIT
David Card PhD Princeton (has a permanent outstanding offer to join MIT faculty)
Andrew Abel PhD MIT
How much rotation is there on the committee?
Why do people seem to think criticizing the MIT favoritism is a harsh attack on MIT? It's not. We academics all have big egos, especially those at the top, so it's fairly natural that we often fail to recognize the work of those outside of people whom we identify with.
The problem seems to be that the MIT assessment of their own people is extremely unreasonably high. Judging from some of the responses in this thread (e.g. "MIT attracts the top students and thus gets all the awards"), this certainly seems plausible.
...but MIT does attract the best students, is there really an argument about that? Can you name many cases where somebody MIT wanted did not go there? It also attracts the best faculty - this year was the first in a very very long time that MIT junior offers were rejected. There is really no surprise that if you look at the best in the profession they have MIT (or Harvard) connection. It is a selection bias. I hope people that write in this thread are not doing empirical work...
...but MIT does attract the best students, is there really an argument about that? Can you name many cases where somebody MIT wanted did not go there? It also attracts the best faculty - this year was the first in a very very long time that MIT junior offers were rejected. There is really no surprise that if you look at the best in the profession they have MIT (or Harvard) connection. It is a selection bias. I hope people that write in this thread are not doing empirical work...
If that's the case, then changing the representation of the selection committee to include respected, probably senior, people and LRMs and LACs won't systematically change who gets selected for the award, but will remove the taint of corruption.
So why not do it?
If crying "selection bias" without any justification is what you call empirical work, that explains some of the shittier papers I've seen recently..
...but MIT does attract the best students, is there really an argument about that? Can you name many cases where somebody MIT wanted did not go there? It also attracts the best faculty - this year was the first in a very very long time that MIT junior offers were rejected. There is really no surprise that if you look at the best in the profession they have MIT (or Harvard) connection. It is a selection bias. I hope people that write in this thread are not doing empirical work...
c257. You make some good points and agree with much of what you've said. The problem is that there is noise in the faculty and candidate selection process. The Bates outcomes suggest that MIT consistently gets the very best, without fail (not just the best on average). We know this isn't true.
...but MIT does attract the best students, is there really an argument about that? Can you name many cases where somebody MIT wanted did not go there? It also attracts the best faculty - this year was the first in a very very long time that MIT junior offers were rejected. There is really no surprise that if you look at the best in the profession they have MIT (or Harvard) connection. It is a selection bias. I hope people that write in this thread are not doing empirical work...
People who write here can factor-in Heckman correction, dumbass...
...but MIT does attract the best students, is there really an argument about that? Can you name many cases where somebody MIT wanted did not go there? It also attracts the best faculty - this year was the first in a very very long time that MIT junior offers were rejected. There is really no surprise that if you look at the best in the profession they have MIT (or Harvard) connection. It is a selection bias. I hope people that write in this thread are not doing empirical work...
top students go to MIT, but also to Harvard and Stanford. Many students turn regularly down MIT for Harvard or Stanford. The same is true for Faculty. Why is only MIT then represented in Clark and Restud tour?
...but MIT does attract the best students, is there really an argument about that? Can you name many cases where somebody MIT wanted did not go there? It also attracts the best faculty - this year was the first in a very very long time that MIT junior offers were rejected. There is really no surprise that if you look at the best in the profession they have MIT (or Harvard) connection. It is a selection bias. I hope people that write in this thread are not doing empirical work...
top students go to MIT, but also to Harvard and Stanford. Many students turn regularly down MIT for Harvard or Stanford. The same is true for Faculty. Why is only MIT then represented in Clark and Restud tour?
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If they are top how come not a single student/faculty from MIT, Harvard, Stanford saw the subprime crisis coming?
Can you name many cases where somebody MIT wanted did not go there?
Maybe you can't, but I can.
While MIT might have the best department on average, at the higher levels, whether a student chooses to go to a program depends crucially on their field of interest. Some students have a good idea of which faculty they want to work with before they attend a program; it's certainly conceivable that someone interested in pure theory would go to Stanford or Stanford GSB; someone who's interested in IO theory might go to Harvard; someone who's interested in a particular type of applied micro might go to Chicago.
Not to mention that a lot of the best research students aren't even discovered until they are in their third or fourth years in grad school. If John List can come so far from somewhere like Wyoming, you bet at least a few students from Stanford or Princeton or Harvard could go further than the top student in MIT from time to time.
Look at the best students of the last year (judging by their placements and job market papers). Can you really say that all of the top 5-10 people came from MIT? I don't even think they account for half of the top 10.
OK, seriously subprime crisis troll, and finance retard Roubini fanboys gtfo. Roubini has been predicting a calamity since he started talking.
Which of her papers should I read? The QJE ones. I'd like to have an informed opinion about her work in particular. But yeah, the process is smelling dunglike.
Okay, guys, this is getting a little ridiculous. I go to MIT, and I can assure everyone that although a very large fraction of the "best" students do come here if admitted, certainly not all of them do. It varies a lot year to year, by field, etc. Plus the admissions process isn't perfect, and since the department doesn't have a lot of funding it needs to rely a lot on the NSF. Good recruitment years tend to be ones where the NSF people do a good job and give money to the same people MIT wants anyway. Four years ago this happened with all MIT's current stars: Dell, Carroll, Chandrasekhar, Hendren. But it doesn't happen every year, and in the end MIT probably gets about 1/3 of the best students - maybe somewhat more at the very top.
And yes, the string of 4 MIT PhDs getting Clark medals in a row is somewhat unrepresentative. Yes, it reflects very well on MIT, but yes, partly it's just a lucky streak. What I don't get is why everyone feels the need to deem this some kind of grand conspiracy. Most of the choices have been pretty logical; there are some other strong candidates who have been passed over, but the winner has always been one of the two or three leading candidates in the mind of the profession. Take a look at this WSJ article on "handicapping the Clark medal" from two years ago:
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/04/22/handicapping-economics-baby-nobel-the-clark-medal/
They list four leading possibilities: Esther Duflo, Sendhil Mullainathan, Jonathan Levin, and Amy Finkelstein. (And go on to mention that Raj Chetty and Roland Fryer will probably get it someday, but are too young for now.)
Three Clark medals later, where are we? Well, the WSJ's predictions (presumably gathered by sniffing around and talking to various economists about who they think the good young prospects are) have been extremely accurate: of its four leading candidates to get the prize in 2010, three out of four ended up receiving it. Unless you think that the WSJ was also just talking to the MIT mafia or something, it sounds like the Clark medal results pretty accurately reflect the consensus in the profession.
Why did they give the award to Finkelstein and not Mullainathan? I don't know the story. Both are very good economists. Maybe the committee thought that Finkelstein is more prominent within her subfield than Mullainathan is in his; she is definitely the top young health economist, whereas Mullainathan is excellent but also just one of several successful young behavioral/development economists. (And they already gave a prize to Duflo two years ago.) She also has results from the Oregon experiment coming in, which figure to be just as important in the field of health economics as the RAND experiment was a few decades ago. These are things you can't gather from citation counts alone, which tend to be heavily biased toward particular subfields and don't reflect the general magnitude of someone's contribution to a particular subfield. But I don't really know; both were deserving, and the committee made a difficult and close choice.
Regardless, the MIT streak is surely coming to an end in the next few years, as leading candidates like Raj Chetty and Nick Bloom have no affiliation with MIT. Maybe then the slightly crazy people on this board will realize that the Clark medal is not a conspiracy, and that it mainly just represents the consensus within the profession. Of course, you can feel free to hate on that consensus...
Is it consensus within the profession or within a few MIT graduates? Do you realize that most of your classmates will be oversold in the market compared to Stanford or Harvard students? Why don't you look at the publication record of students in the 2009 cohort http://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/stanford-vs-harvard-vs-mit-6-years-later-publication-records ? Is it so hard to publish ONE paper without your adviser as a coauthor? The few times MIT has good students, they hire them back immediately (Amy Finkelstein and Esther Duflo). MIT is a lemon producer!
^ Geez, it's really difficult to have a rational conversation with you trolls. When I talk about "consensus within the profession", I'm talking about consensus about the few top candidates for the JBC medal. I am not talking about consensus about the overall PhD output of each program, which is a very different matter.
I disagree with you there as well (I don't see strong evidence that any school has greatly under or over-performed its initial placement in terms of publciation records), but I'm not going to chase you around while you change the subject whenever it's convenient. My point was that the last few years' worth of Clark medalists have generally reflected the consensus within the profession; I cited the WSJ article as evidence, and I'm sure a more careful perusal of the historical record will back it up.
You haven't provided any evidence to the contrary - instead, you just changed the subject.
By the way, it's a little weird that you're making accusations of a
i) Melitz's model involves minor additions to Krugman's model - incorporating firm heterogeneity.
ii) He is older than many people think. I think he is well into his 40s now. He was close to 40 when he got tenure at Princeton.
Holy shit you are clueless. Melitz model is just taking Hopenhayn and applying it to trade. Relative to Krugman Melitz made a very big departure that lead to substantial effects. But relative to IO he mostly just copied/pasted one of their models.
How does this affect the perception? It doesn't. Melitz will very likely receive a Nobel award for opening up a whole new branch of research. His contribution was groundbreaking. All those guys on that JBC list of recent winners should bow down and kiss the floor that Melitz walks. In 20 years everybody will remember Melitz's work while most people are going to forget or downplay the work of all the guys on that list and they will also remember the contributions of List who is not on that "list".
The MIT person makes some interesting points. But let's set aside the fact that MIT has a hold on some of the best people. I think it's important that the process behind any importat award should be beyond, or close to beyond, reproach. The current way things are done leaves open the door to accusations of unfairness. This does a diservice to the profession, the medal, the winner. Even if the process is untainted, the appearance of corruption should be avoided. It has not been.