Great Barrington Declaration
Published:
I have just signed the Great Barrington Declaration.
Mathematical economist
less than 1 minute read
Published:
I have just signed the Great Barrington Declaration.
less than 1 minute read
Published:
Great news. Starting from the September 2025 issue, Econ Journal Watch publishes papers typeset in LaTeX.
For years, I have been begging the editorial board of EJW to accept LaTeX submissions. This summer, I attempted to submit a comment to urge EJW to accept LaTeX submissions, but to my surprise, I was told EJW was working to transition to LaTeX over the summer, so the point of my comment became moot. The call for papers does not seem to be updated yet, but we will see whether they will officially announce that they welcome LaTeX submissions.
3 minute read
Published:
American Express increased the annual fee of Platinum Card from $695 to $895.
In this post last year, I discussed my love-hate relationship with the American Express Platinum Card. When I opened the account many years ago, I recall that the annual fee was $450. Then it increased to $550 and then to $695. Now it’s $895. It has increased to the point that I need to reconsider whether it is worth keeping the card. (See also this opinion.)
The card provides various credits, but most of them are things that I won’t use or are redundant.
I didn’t list all the benefits and credits, but the rest are less important. My membership renewal is next May, so I still have time to think about it.
less than 1 minute read
Published:
This is insane. The California Assembly Bill 7 states
This bill would state that the California State University, the University of California, independent institutions of higher education, and private postsecondary educational institutions may consider providing a preference in admissions to an applicant who is a descendant of slavery, as defined, to the extent it does not conflict with federal law.
As a classical liberal, I believe that whether you should be admitted to college or not depends only on your merit, and who your ancenstors were has no relevance. Besides, how do you even verify whether one of your ancestors was a slave?
The radical left have often promoted discrimination under the name of DEI. This one has the same intention, although it is carefully worded (“may consider providing a preference […] to the extent it does not conflict with federal law”) so that it is not legally binding.
1 minute read
Published:
Econ Journal Watch (EJW) is one of my favorite journals, which publishes critical comments. I have published one myself.
While browsing past issues of EJW, I came across this comment, which documents that the 2017 Accounting Review article of Bird and Karolyi reports exactly identical numbers in all 11 tables as the 2015 working paper version, despite the fact that the authors switched the main specification and the robustness check between the working paper version and the published version. To this comment, Bird and Karolyi replied
we identified a potentially confusing description of our methodology, which was introduced during the final iteration of copy editing at The Accounting Review. This description conflicted with our correct and clear description of our methodology elsewhere in the published version of the paper.
Out of curiosity, I checked the original published article, and the publisher simply states
The authors acknowledged that the published version of their article misstates the use of CRSP-based index membership in the main specifications and Russell-based index membership data as a robustness test. […] However, the authors were unable to provide the original data and code requested by the publisher that reproduce the findings, as shown in the article’s tables, supporting this assertion. Accordingly, the article has been retracted.
I am glad to know that some journals do the right thing.