Tag Archives: UPF

Survival Analysis, health economics and alive economics

This post is only used to record that I have listened to this seminar:

Survival Extrapolation with applications in health economics [click here to download PDF]
Nikos Demiris (Agricultural University of Athens)
UPF Statistics and Operational Research Seminar

However, I didn't understand anything except the exponential equation. I had thought I would understand more, since I know a little about survival analysis (What I have learned on the Chinese R conference), and a little about health economics. But on the seminar I realized that it was beyond my scope of knowledge. Anyway, there were only 4 people (before I showed up), and my dear math teacher Lugosi was there! Lugosi, YOU ARE AMAZING!

Since I didn't actually benefit something from the lecture, it is impossible to leave any comments here. Therefore, I'd like to talk about something about economics. Well, I always wonder whether I can always pick up someone to go to the seminar together with me. It is not important whether you are able to understand what they are saying, but the atmosphere can help you adapt to the way that economists think in. Without doubt, there are only few people who prefer seminars to those time-consuming problem sets. Thus, the final conclusion is that I should go anywhere alone.

I have no right to force anyone to do anything. It's their own choices - and I choose seminars. Maybe it is a bad habit, since it is probable that I cannot get anything useful from a seminar. But I love the way they talk and communicate in the seminar, and I love the different stories that the researchers show in their presentations.

As what I wrote on the front page of this website (www.cloudlychen.net) -  "Love life, love economics", I always regard economics as a living object. Economics is from the real world, not the mathematical equations. Although we need math that complicated enough to describe the economic world specifically, the economics is, and will always be focusing on the real world. Apart from those who are engaging themselves into developing new mathematical methods for economics (e.g. theoretical  econometricians and mathematical economists), who want to explore the world of economics should pay attention to the real life of economics.

Fine, anyway I should judge anything. At least, for me, economics is always alive around everybody and everyday.

comment on Prestigious Law School

This Tuesday was a disaster for me, because I stayed in the classroom and listened to different things for nearly 10 HOURS! But I shouldn't complain anything, anyway it was my own choice.

At that busy and painful day, I listened to a seminar. As usual, here is related information.

Title: The Returns to Attending a Prestigious Law School

Author: Paul Oyer (Stanford University)

UPF Labor, Public, and Development Seminar

Ok, I should admit that I was too tired to follow and focus on all points of the presentation. Anyway, it was a typical empirical work from labor economists, or education. However, the paper is available online here: http://www.econ.upf.edu/docs/seminars/oyer.pdf

Copy some conclusions from his paper:

  • In 2002 and 2007, those lawyers that went to top 10 law schools made, on average, 25% more than those that went to schools ranked 11-20 and over 50% more than those that went to schools ranked 21-100.
  • Graduates of Top 10 schools were also much more likely to work in large law firms in leading law markets.
  • We find that at least a third of the large returns to law school reputation are due to selection, but this selection is almost entirely on a single variable - quality of the undergraduate institution attended.
  • Our results are consistent with a reasonably large causal effect of attending an elite law school, but the exact size of the premium depends varies with assumptions about the role of unobservables.

For anyone interested, please download the paper and read. I was just interested in the topic, and it indicated it is true that "selection" is the main factor, which means those who attend top law schools are expected better than the rest peers. In the other word, they may be also successful even they are in other areas...

Optimists and Pessimists

Today it seemed that I had nothing better to do so I picked up two guys and went to a seminar. It was about "Optimists and Pessimists", or more specifically, the title was Insurance and Perceptions: How to Screen Optimists and Pessimists, offered by Johannes Spinnewijn from London School of Economics as a series of UPF Microeconomics Seminar. Well, I should admit that he is really young (just graduated from MIT last year)...Although there is no decent published papers listed on his CV, according to today's speech, he is supposed to be a good researcher and teacher.

As the titled says, his paper is about how to distinguish two kinds of people in the insurance market: who are optimistic and who are pessimistic. He has got some interesting conclusions by separating the optimistic behaviors into two kinds: baseline-optimistic and control-optimistic. Then follows the discussions in competitive market and monopoly market respectively, there appears the different actions what the agent and principal take. I love one of his conclusion that "people with heterogeneous abilities or risks, but identical perceptions cannot be separated" while "people with different perceptions can be separated with a menu of screening contracts, even when the true abilities or risks are the same". That indicates (I hope I understand it correctly) the expectation plays a more important role than the true abilities when deciding people's behavior. Thus, whatever your true ability is, your attitude partly decides the situation you are facing/living in. At the end, he also considered the government's role and regulation/subsides, but that was not what I really cared about then.

At last, one interesting episode. Mas-colell suddenly appeared when the seminar was going. I was shocked because I've heared that Mas-colell didn't really take part in teaching or any thing else related to our program or GSE. But he appeared... It seemed that he was still caring about what the latest economic researches are doing. Great! (But anyway, during the discussion, he didn't say any words...)

(the temporary loss of my Chinese blog forces me to post in English... Is it good or bad? I have no idea... )