Not if 15D3 is a ref
Bigio from Columbia to UCLA
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15d3 is SO obviously a former referee on the paper, and trying to make sure a bad paper does not get lucky with a new draw of referees and get through.
I don't know the paper but I think it's a good use of this forum for referees to share their detailed notes on papers. We should encourage more of this - both positive and negative reports on good papers to be balanced.
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Being rejected is not a shame, it happens to everybody most of the times. You can't draw conclusions on the quality of a paper based on rejection history. Said that, I share some concerns about his work.
It has been rejected by a bunch of journals already and the weaknesses are so easy to spot that they would need to get a really lucky draw with the referees to get this published in a good place.
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15d3 is SO obviously a former referee on the paper, and trying to make sure a bad paper does not get lucky with a new draw of referees and get through.
Ironically, no. I'm just a random reader who remembers being annoyed with the paper in the past - and when someone asked to "back up those claims" about the papers being crappy I figured I'd take a quick look and see what was there.
It was immediately obvious that Proposition 10 was wrong. I mean, this isn't really my area, but I do know from micro 101 that when you have wedges distorting the allocation of some factor, the losses are second-order in the neighborhood of zero wedges - so obviously the objective can't be log-linear in the wedges or anything like that. (Also, when you have a Cobb-Douglas input-output network, the only reason you get the nice log-linearity with respect to productivity shocks is that the allocation of labor between sectors is endogenously invariant to these shocks. But the allocation of labor certainly is not invariant with respect to these wedges, so the market clearing constraint for labor comes in, and it is linear rather than log-linear and hence breaks the nice log-linearity. This is the more mechanical reason why you're not going to get something log-linear in a setting like this.)
Of course, if as a random guy I can see this right away, I'm sure at least one referee caught it somewhere too. It's a little surprising that the paper as it currently stands is even still posted.