Getting Close to China!

I don't know why, but recent days I have seen so many papers on China - both from the historical and modern perspectives. Today I was so lucky to enjoy Noam Yuchtman's presentation on two of his papers:

“Teaching to the Tests: An Economic Analysis of Educational Institutions in Late Imperial and Republican China”

“Intergenerational Mobility and Institutional Change in 20th Century China” (with Yuyu Chen and Suresh Naidu)

Both of them are revelant to education, but from differnet angles. The first one focus on the historical sharp change in the education system (the abolishment of the traditional system, 科举制度), and the establishment of modern studies on polyscience in China. He uses the individual level data of employees from the Tianjin- Pukou railway company and checks the difference in wages and departments among people with different educatoin backgrounds. The second one exams the intergenerational mobility regarding the insituitional change during the 1949 (the establishment of the People's republic of China) to the 1978 (the reform). That is really interesting...

The Jinpu Railway actually passes Jinan, haha! However, it is a shame that the old Jinan railway station was deconstructed in 1992! I have never seen the real building in my life!!! Here is just a photo as a momory.
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A few days ago I also read an article related to Chinese people, and it is a doctoral thesis of Xiaohuan Lan:

Permanent Visas and Temporary Jobs: Evidence from Postdoctoral Participation of Foreign PhDs in the U.S. (2009)

The Prevalence of Low-Paid Postdoctoral Positions: The Impact of Foreign PhDs on the Wage of Natives. (2010)

Visa Policies and Research Productivity of Postdocs in the U.S. (2011)

The brief introduction from the  author is available in Chinese on his blog. As you can read from the title, it is about the Green Card and the post-doc market. In the labor market it is always interesting to see the impact of policy changes.

OK.... Overall, it is always nice to enjoy great papers answering interesting questions. Acutally I'm also writing a paper on China now. It is about an innovatoin in the financial system in the ancient China. Hopefully I can get some intersting results! Although most time I care about social network, or theories, it is also great to have the chance to do a research on CHINA! With so many great historical records, I don't really understand why there are comparably only a few papers...hence, no matter how little my contribution is, I would like a try!

note on beliefs and expectation

Yesterday and today I spend several hours on the conference held by Crei,

Information, Beliefs and Expectations in Macroeconomics

20 & 21 May 2011

Organized by Kristoffer Nimark (CREI & UPF) and Bartosz Maćkowiak (European Central Bank).

To be honest, I have waited for the conference for a while, as I was writing things on beliefs and expectations. However, this conference is a little bit out of my expectation - so again, my expectations deviates from the truth. My poor background in macro is definitely not enough to support me for understanding the presentations, and among all of them, I picked a few to stay and thus make myself confused. They were:

Exogenous Information, Endogenous Information, and Optimal Monetary Policy
Luigi Paciello | Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance
*Mirko Wiederholt | Northwestern University
Discussant: Jordi Galí | CREI & Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Learning about Consumption Dynamics
Michael Johannes | Columbia U., Columbia Business School
Lars Lochstoer | Columbia U., Columbia Business School
*Yiqun Mou | Columbia U., Columbia Business School
Discussant: Francisco Barillas | Emory U., Goizueta Business S.

Public’s Inflation Expectations and Monetary Policy
Leonardo Melosi | London Business School
Discussant: Francesco Bianchi | Duke University

Just as I had expected, it was too easy for me to get lost in these presentations. In a few minutes I got the feeling that I don't know what's going on so ever. well...Except for the fantastic graphs I have seen, I haven't gained much intuition from them.

A noteworthy point is in Mou's presentation, he empirically showed the convergence to rational expectation. I should admit I don't really understand the techniques he utilized, and so are the debates afterwards. After his presentation, I talked to him with the learning process a little bit, but haven't benefited a lot... there is still a long way to go.

Also, I found another interesting book to read,

1587, a year of no significance : the Ming dynasty in decline / Ray Huang

Very nice book on history. I really treasure this period of time that I have got enough space to read and think across different subjects. As planned before, I also found Keynes' book,

A Treatise on probability

Things are so beautiful!

A few books want to read

Fortunately or accidentally, I only have two classes this term. Meanwhile, they separate them into four days, so I only have two-hours class every day from Monday to Thursday. Compared to my previous schedule, it is too relaxing.

An advantage now is that I have enough time to read and think. Today I found Becker's book by chance, when I was browsing the literature on "social economics", or socio-economics. It is quite exciting, and I have realized how deep the water might be- before I was only using my naive intuition that there is something I can contribute soon.

The book I'm talking about now is

Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy, 2001, Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment.

Before I was paying more attention solely to network economics, and it turned out to be that they were quite similar to each other in most sense; however, socio-economics is for sure more broad.

Moreover, I took a few hours finishing reading another book,

Salsburg, D. (2002) The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century

From the name, you can see that this book is about basic statistics. To save time, I read its Chinese translation. Not very long, but very exciting - maybe I have been, and will always be attracted by mathematics and statistics. Especially the later one, perhaps due to the fact that I have so many friends in this area, is one field beyond economics that has influenced me the most, and more on the level of conception and methodology than techniques or actual methods.

@Roma Things remain to be clear

@Roma. Things remain to be clear

While reading this book, it reminds me another book I read before, which is about the famous economist Keynes,

Robert Skidelsky, 2005, John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman

What impressed me most at that time was not Keynes' contribution to economics - although nobody can neglect that, but his ideas on probability.  Until now, I still have the wish that one day I want to read Keynes' original book on probability somewhere.

I want to read Becker's book only for the reason that I need an idea for my history paper. One question I have been seeking for the answer for a while: why do we need to care about the network structure? Before, I was only arguing that the "summation is a naive way to draw the group's characteristics"; now it seems that I need to really re-think about this argument. In addition to sum or mean, people have developed distribution to help understand the world; furthermore, from central limit theorem, normal distribution can be utilized in most scenarios. Therefore, under what particular case will summation cause a severe problem?

Another thing I'm thinking about now is after reading the "Lady tasting tea", a term still remains to be explained more clearly: frequency school and Bayesian school's debate on the definition of probability. On one side we are lucky today that following Baye's idea will not be regarded as heterodox any more; on the other side, although his idea itself is very simple, how to make a perfect use of it is still a very tricky and should be dealed with carefully.

I'll stop here for now, and see whether I can gain some new senses soon. This year is too short- I need a longer time to make all things clear.

the cry of the sky

Today Barcelona rained again. Throughout the rain, I can feel the cry of the sky. Yes, the sky cried for me, instead of me... How many clouds do they need to cry like this? Peaceful, but endless...

I have cried for the past four days... actually today I decided not to cry anymore, then met a song, and then tears just fell... I don't like that, but unfortunately, nothing could have stopped it.

When the sky cried, I realized that there was no need for me to contribute my tears anymore. The city is crying...

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