Visa is considering moving some California operations to an IT center in Austin, Texas.  I’ve blogged about investment incentives in the past. The Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) is offering a $7.9 million incentive contingent on $1.5 million in local incentives from the City of Austin.  TEF, sometimes called a “deal closing” fund, has the ability to easily offer these incentives with few conditions (and limited oversight).

The bigger fight will be in the City of Austin, set to have a public hearing on Dec 6^th.  For some commentary seehere and here.

The quick highlights are that the City has imposed some rules on the minimium average salary necessary for these incentives and the specific details on employment.  The public hearing will probably address even more details, but the City leadership seems concerned about the costs versus the benefits of these incentives.

As I’ve blogged previously, I’m not a fan of these incentives.  They are largely wasteful uses of scarce resources.  But as much as I would like to believe that the City of Austin has a better formula to making sure incentives are effective, these “performance requirements” were commonly used by developed and developing countries in the past.  They stopped doing this because it was very ineffective.

Sorry I don’t have more positive news about their strategy or concrete suggestions for the City of Austin.  I also really don’t have many readers.

Continuing my theme of documenting firm-specific location incentives, I’m listing a few incentives in Slovakia from October 2012.  Why should you care about Slovakia?

Incentives in the European Union are largely governed by “state aid” rules.  In short, the least developed countries and regions within countries have the ability to offer incentives to firms, although the legislation is complex.  As the EU continues to heated negotiations over the 2014-2020 budget, state aid and agriculture are both on the table for potential cuts.

The Slovak Investment and Trade Development Agency provides some details of state aid for investment into Slovakia and the EU commissions has a pretty informative website that addresses state aid.  PriceWaterhouseCoopers also has a nice overview from 2010.

Below is an incomplete list of incentives from October 2012.  I’ve also seen one story of a firm trying to renegotiate to get more incentives.

Incentives Deals (Oct 2012)

Ekoltech (Slovakia) receives an incentive (Tax credit) to the value of $0.95 million to invest into the city of Filakovo (Banska Bystrica) Slovakia in the area of Consumer Goods.

Muhlbauer (Muehlbauer Technologies) (Germany) receives an incentive (Tax credit) to the value of $5.47 million to invest into the city of Nitra (Nitra) Slovakia in the area of Information Technology & Telecom (ITT).

ZKW Slovakia (Austria) receives an incentive (Tax credit) to the value of $27.98 million to invest into the city of Krusovce (Nitra) Slovakia in the area of Automotive.

Fagor Ederlan Slovensko (Spain) receives an incentive (Tax credit) to the value of $3.64 million to invest into the city of Ziar nad Hronom (Banska Bystrica) Slovakia in the area of Automotive.

Continental Automotive Systems Slovakia (Germany) receives an incentive (Tax credit) to the value of $6.30 million to invest into the city of Zvolen (Banska Bystrica) Slovakia in the area of Automotive.

Delta Electronics (Taiwan) receives an incentive (Tax credit) to the value of $7.16 million to invest into the city of Dubnica nad Vahom (Trencin) Slovakia in the area of Electronics.

Bekaert Slovakia (Belgium) receives an incentive (Tax credit) to the value of $11.77 million to invest into the city of Hlohovec (Trnava) Slovakia in the area of Basic Materials.

Magneti Marelli (Italy) receives an incentive (Tax credit) to the value of $38.47 million to invest into the city of Kechnec (Kosice) Slovakia in the area of Automotive.

Mondi SCP (South Africa) receives an incentive (Tax credit) to the value of $35.54 million to invest into the city of Ruzomberok (Zilina) Slovakia in the area of Basic Materials.

Samsung Electronics (South Korea) receives an incentive (Tax credit) to the value of $27.70 million to invest into the city of Galanta (Trnava) Slovakia in the area of Electronics.

With the proliferation of surveys of competitivenss and easy of doing business, numerous countries have made substantial reforms to imporvie their business climate.

The World Bank Doing Business Report is out, complete with country rankings on the ease of doing business.

One concern with these rankings is that country’s can try to game the numbers, similar to Law Schools manipulating statistics to improve their US News Rankings.

Here is a direct quote from the summary of the report.

Rwanda is among the 30 plus economies that have created special units to focus on indicators monitored byDoing Business, such as the average time it takes to start a business, transfer property, build a warehouse, or get connected to electricity. Some 17 countries in Africa are among the most improved over the last eight years.

Are these economic reforms going to be on the midterm?

The US Congressional Research Service just came out with an analysis of foreign investment in the US.

A few interesting points from the report

1.  Investment is healthy but down from the peak

Investment in the US had fallen from the peak in 2000, declined again in 2008, and now is close to 2008 levels again.

2.  The stock of investment in the US is dominated by rich countries. 

The lead investors are the UK, Japan, the Dutch, Germans, Swiss….  95% of this stock is from developed countries.

3.  About a third of investment is in manufacturing, followed by banking and finance. 

This is a larger share than domestic investment, but lots of FDI is outside of manufacturing.  If the US had looser rules on investing in banking, airlines, etc I think this ratio would be even lower.

4.  Existing investors provide most of the “new” investments.

The majority of “foreign investment” in the US actually comes from the retained earnings of foreign multinationals. 82% of US inward investment came from investors already in the US.

5.  MNCs are capital intensive, employing few workers

US affiliates of foreign firms employ 6 million Americans, which is less than 4% of the US employment force.  These are real numbers, but they far from dominate employment statistics.  But the average salary is $76,000, indicating hiring higher skilled workers.

Quick Thoughts

I teach a politics of multinational corporations class and this pretty much fits the general pattern in the developed world.  The one exception is that developing countries are becoming more active in foreign investment, yet the US has seen little of this.  This could be because some of the higher profile investments (CNOCC, Dubai ports, Ralls Corporation, Huawei and ZTE, etc) have been blocked for national security reasons.

Continuing the theme of documenting investment incentives, I came across a $10 million tax incentive to a services firm in Provo, Utah.  It turns out that it is Qualtrics, the online survey tool used by many academics.  Our department just secured a license to use their software.

The Salt Lake City Tribune ran a story documenting the motivation and use of these incentives.  Here is a quote from the story:

With more than half of the Fortune 100 companies and 1,300 universities as customers, Qualtrics’ sales have been doubling each year for six years, Orgill said. Managing the growth has been difficult, and the company’s need for more senior management is outstripping its ability to develop enough leadership talent from among its 250 employees. The problem pushed Qualtrics to think about moving out of Utah, he said.

The question became, “Do we want to bring additional people from outside [the state], or do we want to move to a location that would be in a very established tech sector?” Orgill said. With the incentive’s help, the company now will be able to recruit managerial talent without leaving Provo, he said.

I guess this is a reasonable logic for retaining investment.  But the idea that the firm will use the incentives to lure talet away from other states seems like an odd public policy motivation and definitely economically inefficient.

I’ve heard back from a few more search chairs and a few of them are running the same searches this year as last year.

One quick piece of information.  The pool of candidates looks a lot stronger this year than last year.  This includes assistant professors trying to move and newly minted ABDs.

It isn’t hard to understand on how an increased supply of jobs leads a bunch of assistant to start sending out applications.  But why does the pool of ABDs look stronger this year than last?  Why are there so many candiates on the market with publications?

1.  Selection (entering the market): The decision on when to go on the market isn’t always clear.  Good markets make that decision a bit easier.  This “good” market may have lead lots of candidates that otherwise wouldn’t have gone on the market this year to enter now.  My guess (no data on this) is that students that have pubs are the ones that feel like they are competitive and thus entered the market this year.

2.  Luck.  Some years are booms, some are busts.  I know WashU has a huge class on the market this year mostly due to having a large incoming class five years ago.  This class was very, very strong and we had very little attrition.

3. Productivity: A few of my lawyer friends told me that the downturn has increased pressure for lawyer to work more billable hours and figure out more ways to become more efficient.  The bad market may have incentivized students (and faculty) to push harder to publish.

These are really conjectures.  But search chairs think this year’s ABDs seem to have more publications than previous years.

I took a look at Google Analytics and my website traffic is through the roof!  Ok, it is 100-300 visit or so a day.  But that is a lot more than my normal 8 visit a day.

I finally went to Political Science Job Rumors (I refuse to link to this) to see what sort of discussion is going on about my posts on the political science job market (original posts here, here and here). I really hate the rumor mill, but at the same time, this is 20 min of my day.  I’ve also promised myself that I would never post on the rumor mill unless absolutely necessary.  So I will post here and someone will link to the rumor mill.  My hands are clean?

Here is a summary of questions, or rather questions I made up based on these comments and personal emails I received.

Question: You’ve collected job market data and counted publications?  Are these really quality pubs?

I answered this in my 2nd post post above.  My counting of pubs is that most of them are quality and most of the search committees that I heard from said the same.

Question: Why is Jensen counting beans?  What’s the deal with coding “quality pubs”?  Is this a WashU thing?

To be honest, I didn’t completely understand this comment.  But let’s give it a try.

Maybe the question is based on the research at WashU.  We definitely have a quantitative focus with the majority of faculty working with quantitative data.  A few folks focus on theory (normative or formal) but even most of them use quantitative data.  I’m guessing our ratio of people doing quantitative work at WashU is higher than most departments, but I don’t think we’re so far out of the normal.  I think our focus on method and formal theory is more unique.  But I’m not one of them.  I’m one of the lower tech folks in the department.

My post was about counting.  I don’t even add them.  I just count if a student has a pub.  This really doesn’t say much about our department.  The Harris School uses more of a qualitative method of reading abstracts.  I’m pretty sure we would all agree that this doesn’t point to a more qualitative in their research than most other programs.

Ok, that read a bit snarky.  But to be clear, I collected this data on my own.

Question: Ok, but why did you count publications and not something else?

1.  If you look at my original post, this was one of the few things on studetn vitas that I could directly observe.  I originally wanted to examine patterns of field work (if most comparativists still do field work) but this wasn’t available on most websites.  But my plan is to continue to do more interviews with search chairs to ask about the role of fieldwork for comparative jobs.  Without running a fake job ad and collecting a bunch of applications across fields, I can’t observe much beyond posted CVs.

By the way, please don’t try to get IRB approval to run a fake job ad.  There are enough jobs out that there disappear due to funding cuts.

2.  I’ve been under the impression that publications are very  important for students on the market.  This again might say more about me than my department.  But I wanted to directly test my own intuition.  I expected to find that a small number of students had pubs, and they tended to get the top jobs.  I was wrong.  There I said it.  I was wrong.  There are way more ABDs with pubs than I expected.

Question: Why do you count quality pubs?

Again, two reasons.

1. I originally counted all publications equally and a few people emailed me asking about the quality of the publications.  Without releasing the data, I had to make some coding decisions.  I didn’t mean to offend anyone with a publication in one of these journals, but I had to draw a line somewhere.
2. Most of the search chairs I talked to used a similar (although informal) system.  One committee member mentioned “top pubs” and said they weren’t referring to “Electoral Studies, etc.”  Another said that there short list included folks with “top publications” and mentioned the list of publications.

My point of this bean counting exercise is more bureaucratic than intellectual.  How do search committees think about publications?  Most of the committees I talked do had some sort of heuristic that differentiated pubs.  I think the line I drew in my previous post (International Interactions, PRQ, etc) isn’t far from the heuristic that most schools use.  I’m just a messager.

Question: Why do ABDs in comparative publish more than other fields?

I really don’t know.  This could be an artifact of a single year of data, the role of advisors co-authoring with students, the type of work, etc.

Not a good answer, but an honest one.  I don’t know.  What is perplexing to me is that I never thought of comparative professors publishing at higher rates than other fields.  So why the high productivity ABDs?

My two best conjectures are:

1) There are a lot more cross-national data sets out there and ways to generate your own data from online materials.  Well trained comparativists have a wealth of data and tons of interesting questions they can answer.

2) There is something random about the market this year.

Question: Why the criticism of Nate?  He can take it and loves the publicity.

Hey, that last part wasn’t a question.   It was an answer from the rumor mill.

Can I take it?  I have a job, a very thick skin and I honestly don’t think any of these criticisms (last time I checked) were out of bounds.  Being upset about my choice of what data to collect and how to code it is fair intellectual criticisms.  Maybe I don’t give the rumor mill enough credit.  I expected more height jokes.

Do I love the publicity?  Yes and no.  I originally started this blog because WashU started a new website system and I had the option of adding a blog.  I was on parental leave and with my son and posted some research posts while he napped.  In my sleep deprived state that was about all I was good for.  It was actually the perfect little bit of (mostly one-way) intellectual exchange while enjoying fatherhood.

My idea was to present bits of my research and see if it drew any attention from non-academic types.  The Monkey Cage picked up one of my stories and I received an email or two from some non-academics.  That was the height of my blogging career thus far.

The fact that I am engaging with criticisms on the rumor mill signals that there is some part of me that enjoys the attention, or at least I think the question of the academic job market to be other important and opague.  I’ve also received a bunch of unsolicited emails from search chairs giving me their personal opinion and experiences.

But I honestly don’t want to be known as the guy who collected a bunch of grad data in 2012.  Nothing good comes of being that guy.

Future Follow-up Work and More Preliminary Findings

I’m a short timer as the director of graduate studies (done in Jan), but I hope to do some post-market work.  For those of you who hate the WashU quantitative focus, I think this follow-up will interview search committee members at a range of schools.

But I do have some more preliminary findings from my qualitative interviews.   I began by emailing friends on search committees but I also asked for feedback from a few schools that I talked to about our job market candidates.  For example, a school called me about one of our ABDs and after talking about our candidate I asked about their search.  Then people started email me on their own.  I’ve probably talked to about 30-40 different people about searches, but this sample is by no means random.

A few searches had upwards of 300 files (these are searches that are listed in more than one field).  I know of at least one of these searches where each search committee member looked at every file.  If the committee gave each file 5 minutes (enough to read the CV, cover letter and some letters) it would be 25 hours.  Cut down the list to 10-12 files and start reading the research.  Lots and lots of time.

Most of the search committees stressed the importance of using heuristics to cut down this first wave into a manageable 30 or so files.  To my surprise, not that many departments stress the Ph.D. granting institution as a way to cut down the files.  Your grad program matters, but there are literally 30+ programs that could place students at even the best departments.

The one common heuristic, sorry folks, is having a publication in a good journal.  Other common heuristics included your letter writers, your topic and how it fit with the department.  Fit was something that popped up almost as often as publications.  There was more of divide on teaching.  Most departments liked to see some teaching, but how valuable this was varied quite a bit.

There are no hard and fast rules on how to get an interview.  But I think the key lesson here (outside of my narrow focus on publications) is how important heuristics are in getting your file looked at.

I think this starts with picking a dissertaiton topic that is interesting and really engaged a major literature in political science.  I think one common problem in graduate school is to see an event in the world and want to write about it.  I think this is a fantastic strategy if you do it in a way that isn’t fleeting.  You need to talk about the event in a way to engage a much larger literature.  That is just my take, not something that came from the interviews.

This also means having a clear abstract that your pitches what is important and interesting about your work, a CV that signals your abilty to teach and do research, or anything else that has your file jump out from a pile of 100-300.

Not the most concrete of advice, but this is all I got thus far.

UPDATE

I didn’t realize that Tom Pepinsky had another blog post on job market advice.

Chris Blattman notes that the econ market is very different.  Candidates are penalized for 2nd and 3rd tier publications.

I’ve been trying to keep better records on the articles I review.  I keep all of the old reviews but it is hard to keep track someitmes.  I try to keep a record of my reviews (just the journal and title) in an excel spreadsheet.  Here is my count of reviews done since 2005 (when I started keeping these records).

2005   11 articles

2006   14 articles

2007   27 articles

2008   26 articles

2009   33 articles

2010   38 articles

2011   26 articles (Parental Leave: Basically no reviews from Sept-Dec)

2012   20 articles thus far (5 more to review in the next few weeks)

I honestly don’t know what the average reviewer burden is for most tenured folks.  I’ve published one paper in a management journal and one in an econ journal.  This means that I get a few papers a year from non-political science journals.  But the major of these reviews are in poli sci (19/20 this year are poli sci).

Nothing profound to say.  I was just finishing up a review tonight and looked at the numbers.

I’ll open up the comments in case anyone wants to offer insights on their reviewer burden.

In two previous posts I blogged about support for US farm subsidies.  This is part of a research agenda that I’ve largely struggled to publish outside of one article.  But I’m still pushing ahead on this.

In one post I examined how the inclusion of food stamps into the US farm bill affected public support for agriculture subsidies.  While Ferejohn argues that this was essential to the farm bill logroll, I find find little public opinion effect.

What I do find is that individuals in the US are very sensitive to “global frames”.  You can read my post about the results, but if you frame the US as high relative to other countries in terms of farm subsidies, support drops.  If you frame it as low relative to other countries, support increases.

We just ran a series of survey experiments in the YouGovUK.  Lots of results on policy diffusion, globalizaiton and accountability, and globalization preferences coming soon.

But I added one question on farm subsidies in the UK.  One half of our 1,500 respondents received Prime A and one half Prime B.

Prime A: Countries around the world provide different types of support for farmers, including financial payments to farmers.  European farm payments are generally more generous than those of foreign countries, such as Australia and Canada.

Prime B: Countries around the world provide different types of support for farmers, including financial payments to farmers.  European farm payments are generally less generous than those of foreign countries, such as Japan and South Korea.

Then the respondents were asked the following question:

Which of the following statements best describes your opinion?

1. Britain should increase farm payments
2. Britain should decrease farm payments
3. Don’t know

What do the results look like?

In aggregate almost 40% supported increases, 26% decreases and 34% indicated don’t know.

Individuals identifying as Labour and Conservative supporters had similar numbers indicating Britain should increase farm payments (around 40%).  Labour had more Don’t Know answers than Conservatives (35% to 26%) and Conservatives were more likely to indicate prefering a decrease in farm payments (33% to 24%).

What were the results of the experiment?  Really no aggregate impact.  I just started looking at this data on Monday, but there doesn’t seem to be nearly as much movement as in the US data.   There is essentially zero impact across all categories.

Why is this the case?

1.  One concern I had in the set-up of this survey is how the European Common Agriculture Policy affects policy preferences.  The UK really doesn’t have unilateral control over their agriculture policy.  Also, framing EU subsidies relative to the rest of the world is a real difference from the US.

2.  It is possible that since the CAP has been debated extensively, Brits know a lot more about agriculture policy and have fixed preferences on the issues.  But this YouGov survey suggests very low level of knowledge by people in the UK on farming and farm policy.

I put this farming question on the UK survey as a quick pilot for future work.  I have to think harder about this and I have a bunch of co-variates in the data on who the respondents blame or assign credit to for economic outcomes, some good knowledge questions, etc

But the fact that the US results came out so clean and the magnitude was so large makes me think there is a real systematic difference.  But why?

This is part three of hopefully a three part series on the political science academic job market.  I think my stint as WashU Director of Graduate Studies has me thinking about this too often.

Before I start this post, let me make two points.

1. I’m not sure this blog entry title is really appropriate.  There is nothing about supply in here and not that much on demand either.  False advertising.  Just like the Macinistas that told me that Apple products never crash.  I’m going to go Office Space on my MacBook Pro one of these days.
2. One of my colleagues admitted to me that he reads this blog.  He thinks I have a crappy blog name and I need something cool like the Monkey Cage.  My response is that there is nothing cool about political science.  There, I just alienated one of my two readers.  Blog by Nate.

Convergence on Candidates

I chatted with someone yesterday about academic job markets in the natural sciences and how offers (especially senior offers) are usually accepted, while many political science searches (junior and senior) seem to fail.  There are a bunch of reasons for this (the high costs of labs actually makes these natural searches very different than political science searches), but one interesting observations was that even the superstar junior candidates tend to only get one offer.  Not sure how accurate this account is, but sure sounds like job market collusion to me.

Ok, forget the sciences.  In political science I keep hearing that this year we see a ton of talent across fields with lots of candidates that would meet or exceed the bar in most years.  Yet we’ll probably see a competition for the “best” candidates, where a bunch of schools will spend time and money trying to attract a handful of candidates.  Most of these schools will get nothing for their efforts.

Why is it that everyone of going after the same set of candidates?  Don’t they know about the winner’s curse and that NFL first round draft picks are overvalued?

Shouldn’t some schools shoot a little lower and net a very good candidate instead of not getting the excellent candidate?

There are a lot of possible explanations for this, but I thought I would bring up one and then link it back to my previous two posts on the job market.

Risk Averse Committees and Departments

I really like one of Malcom Galdwell’s New Yorker articles that combines two things I really care about.  Teaching and the NFL.

There are lots of interesting elements to this story, but the relevant point is how difficult it is predict success in the classroom and in professional sports.  None of the training, prior experience, or other observable factors are great predictors of success.

Advise to Junior Faculty

My quick take (and this might be a WashU perspective) is that search committees and departments are really risk averse.  Ph.D. institutions, letters or rec, etc are all pretty poor predictors of success.

Most schools have a six year tenure clock.  Work backwards on when your file goes in, how long the peer review takes, how long it takes to write a paper, etc.  For most candidates the majority of their tenure file is work from their first three years on the job.  That is my guess at least.

What numerous people told me at the start of my career were versions of:

• Make sure you get out of the gates quickly.
• Get your dissertation work published immediately.
• Don’t tell yourself that you’ll spend your first year or even the first semester on your teaching.  Get stuff under review.

Actually, that might be advice to ABDs

This is tough advice to follow, but it is a lot easier if you already have a stream of polished papers ready to go out and have some experience in the peer review process.

How does this relate to the job market for ABDs?   Sometimes graduate students ask me how solo authored pieces counted versus work with faculty.  I don’t know of any hard rule, but the point is that articles can signal different things.

But can a student cut it as a junior faculty member balancing a 2-2 teaching load (if you’re lucky) with tons of other administrative duties?  Hard to tell.  But many search committee members assume that students that have figured out how to publish in graduate school are more likely to publish as an assistant professor.  This is imperfect, since there are some students who try hard in graduate school and get a bad luck of the draw in the review process.  There are also graduate students that publish because advisors are driving the bus and the students are along for the ride.

This isn’t to say that students shouldn’t focus on big ideas or skills in graduate school.  The point is that departments don’t want to hire catapillars that might turn into butterflies.  They want to hire butterflies.  Wow, that was a stupid analogy.

How about teams that want a quarterback shouldn’t acquire Tim Tebow.  That wasn’t even an analogy.

I am a Blowhard

My son is asleep and this is my window to finished some research papers, prep my teaching and review articles for a bunch of journals.  I’m also the trifecta of Director of Graduate Studies, dissertation advisor with multiple students on the market, and a chair of a Wash U search committee.  Lots of work to do and I just spend part of the day writing up advice to junior faculty and ABDs on a blog with one reader.  I should probably listen to my own advice.

But look back at my advice in this post.  I bet you’re find some logicaly inconsistencies, factually incorrect assumptions, and downright stupid points.  Maybe that is part of the takeaway.  I’ve been on multiple search committees and had some degree of power over hiring.  That scares even me.

I just blogged about my thoughts and then told you my thoughts are stupid.  Did I just become the M. Night Shymalon of political science?

Back to my point.  Search committees are composed of people.  Very, very fallible people.  They are trying to predict academic success.  And they do a very poor job of it.  But there are huge costs, at least collectively, to making mistakes.

Committees are looking for sure things, and candidates with publications might be the closest to a sure thing.  This doesn’t mean you have to publish to get a job or that students with pubs will always get jobs.  But it does mean you should probably send out your work for peer review.  You also probably shouldn’t take advice from a blog that has a readership of one. Thanks for reading mom.