I received a few emails in the past couple of days about my previous blog post on the supply of political science Ph.Ds.  I didn’t realize that I have readers others than my mom.  Hi mom.

The content of the emails included:

1. Are these “real” publications?
2. Are you going to write a PS article using this data?
3. What is the take home point?

1.  Publication Accounting

I did a little cleaning of the data I collected.  This data is really just for internal purposes (as the Director of Grad Studies) so I didn’t want to spend any additional resources collecting this data or coding pubs.

But I did quickly eyeball the publication data and decided to go through and see how many of these are “real” publications.  I’ve been on a bunch of searches over the years at WashU (comparative, open field, methods, formal theory, and IPE) so I went with my gut on how committee members would perceive journal publications.

No offense to any journal editors out there, but I thought of journals like PRQ, the Journal of Democracy, International Interactions, etc as the floor. This “floor” might piss off a few of you with pubs in these outlets.  But the point is for us to do some really conservative counting.

Basically, there are about 30 or so journals that could fit my criteria.

How many students have quality articles?  90 candidates (or 30.51% of the sample).  These percentages ranged from over 40% of methods candidates with pubs, and 16.42% of the theorists with pubs.

My gut on these “quality” publications probably greatly understates the quality pubs out there.  I didn’t count pubs outside of poli sci (Nature, Stats and Econ journals) and I know less about some fields than others.  I bet the low theory number is due to my lack of familiarity with theory journals.

A quick personal note.  Talking about “quality” pubs sounds like dickish bean counting.  But my loyal reader wanted my best guess.  I aim to please.

A total of 21 candidates had pubs in the big three (APSR, AJPS, and JOP) with a bunch of students publishing in QJPS, BJPS and top subfield journals.  I would say there are 40-50 publications in “top” journals.

So my 45% figure from the previous post overstates things a bit, but 30% is probably under counting.  We can split hairs on how to count this but this is my blog.

This summary counts solo and co-authored pubs.  Solo authored pubs are less common, but there are some candidates out there with top solo pubs as well.

2.  What to do with this data?  Will you publish a Political Science (PS) piece with this? 

First, I honestly didn’t count PS as one of the “quality” publications in the data.  PS articles are good for the discipline, but I feel like there seems to be little professional incentive for individuals to publish in PS.  I might be wrong, but hey, this is my career.

Second, there really is little “personal” incentive to publish with this exact data.  Much of the rumor mill in political science is glorified gossip that often ends with attacks on grad students at the start of their careers.  This data would mostly be used for this purpose, and not to improve graduate training. I want no part of this.

3.   What are the conclusions? 

The farther I get into my career, the more I realize that I don’t know a whole lot about how this discipline works.  I had a gut feeling that pubs differentiated ABDs, but this story is a bit more complicated.

Given the difficulties with this quantitative data, let’s go back to the search committees I talked to this year.  The word that I am getting is that there are pools of 20-30 candidates in most searches with reasonable records, generally including publications. But only 3 or 4 get interviews.

At least one search committee has tried to break out of the bean counting and simple heuristics of Ph.D., NSF grant, etc.  Ethan Bueno de Mesquita at U of Chicago Harris Schools explained their method for search committees and he gave me the ok to share it here.  The summary is something like this:

For every single application received the committee reads the abstract of the job market paper without looking at any other materials (CV, grad school, letters of rec, etc). If a candidate has an idea, research design, theory, etc that appeals to the committee, then he or she goes in the long list. This generally yields a long list of 15 people.  After the long list is made, the committee looks at the whole file.

This is the first time I’ve heard of this procedure, and it really does put ideas at the front of the search process.  I haven’t thought this through in any detail, but I really like it in principle.

But without search committees making conscious choices like the search that Ethan described at the Harris School, I think simple heuristics are often how candidates are selected. I don’t have anything more profound than that.  Sorry.

But search committees did constantly stress the importance of both “quality” and “fit”.  Giving grad students advice to write “quality” pieces that “fit” with potential departments isn’t what I had hoped to conclude from this exercise.

One final quick point.  Stephen Saideman compares the political science market to the NFL draft.  If we go with this analogy, it really is a draft with unlimited free agency.  Thus the top schools can forego the “draft” and hire those with a longer track record.  Rather than predicting success from some heuristic, just hire those that are already successful.

For the record, I hate the New York Yankees.

[I get a ton of spam and generally leave the comments closed.  But I’ll keep them open in case folks have thoughts.  No Viagra ads please.]

Many years ago I started a professional development workshop for our Ph.D. students at WashU.  One reoccurring topic is the academic job market.

This year I assigned four undergraduate students the task of collecting data from the US news top 25 political science departments on their job market candidates.  Specifically, I wanted my RAs to find the CV or website of students on the market. This data collection included the following attributes:

• Field
• Does the candidate have a solo authored publication?  A co-authored publication?
• Did the candidate complete an exam in methods or formal theory?
• Years to degree

Obviously this doesn’t answer many of the important questions used by search committees. Did the applicant do field work?  What type of training did the student get in grad school? What do the letters of rec say?  We could add a long list of the different attributes and experiences, but it turns out my very minimal set data collection was a lot harder than expected.  Why?

Candidates:  Some candidates don’t have a web site or CV.  Others didn’t list their field, their committee, or the minimum info search committees would want on a CV.

Departments:  Some departments don’t prominently list their Ph.D. students on the market!  Others make it very difficult by providing very little information or have a website that includes many students that have been on the market for years.

Students can make their own choices on what they do with their careers. But as the Director of Graduate Studies, I think there are minimum professional responsibilities that departments have toward their students.

I digress.

Of the 372 candidates from 23 departments, only 288 of 372 had CVs that included minimal data.

Forgetting about selection and data quality issues (this is blog) we can look at some patterns in this data.  My guesstimation is that this sample looks similar to previous samples published in PS on the job market.

I had my research assistants write the title of any journal publications for candidates.  After cutting an unpublished undergrad thesis or two and a few other suspicious publications, I found that 45% of candidates with CVs posted have some sort of publication (23% with a solo and 27% with a co-authored pub).

I didn’t make any hard judgment calls of what is a “real” publication and what isn’t.  My quick take is that the majority of these pubs are at peer-reviewed journals that are a positive signal to search committees. There is some variance across subfields with political theorists the least likely to publish (32%) and comparativists the most likely to publish (52%).  Even 32% is a much higher number than I expected.

I shot off a few emails to search committees to get their take on the market.  I asked search chairs for info and advice on how candidates moved from the general pool to the short list.  Before seeing this data I would have guessed that a pub would set you apart.  Maybe the way my undergrads coded the data overstates the amount of competition out there and the number of high quality candidates?

Not according to the chairs and search committee members to the small number of search chairs that gave me info on their searches.  Most schools had their long short lists of about a dozen candidates mostly with pubs.   Many other candidates with pubs were left off the long short lists.  I stress that this was the story from broad range of institutions (R1, liberal arts colleges, etc).

The advice I got on how to make it to the short list varied.  Some committee members stressed fit with the department, other stressed the quality of the publication (top journal, solo authored if possible), others stressed grad program reputations, letters of rec, etc.

What is my take away point?  I really don’t know.  I had the feeling that the magic formula for getting an interview was a decent publication.  I think that was probably the case when I was on the market as an ABD (2001).  Not so much anymore.

If there is some sort of change in the market for ABDs, is this a good or bad thing?  I originally wrote up some thoughts that both praised the high quality (and quantity) of research from ABDs and expressed some concern that the ubiquity of publications could lead search committees to fall back onto other criteria that are less objective and more prone to bias.

But to be honest, I don’t know what to make of this.  I just wanted to highlight one descriptive statistic from this data collection.

UPDATES:

Tom Pepinsky has a great blog post on this data and a Chris Blattman post that offers insights from search committees.

I’ve blogged a few times about the use of investment incentives to attract firms and retain existing jobs.  My quick take is that these incentives are generally ineffective in swinging investment and are too costly relative to the benefits.

This week Kentucky approved up to $17 million in state and local incentives to attract retain Houston based Westlake Chemical.   

Interestingly, Businessweek ran a brief story on the owners of this company last month.  While the story focuses on the family owners, I was struck by the incredible performance of the company over the past year (7x increase in stock prices, 17% rise in profits, etc).

I think the obvious point from this story is that incentives aren’t being used to prop up a struggling company.  These incentives are being targeted to this firm, most likely either due to threats to leave Kentucky and/or the desire of politicians to use these incentives to take credit for this investment.

Eddy Malesky (Duke) and I are working on a book project that examines global incentives for investment that I’ve discussed previously on this blog.  You can read a very short summary of a survey experiment we can ran for this project here.

Reading some press releases, often by US state governors, we struck by a common pattern.  Governord don’t hide the costs of incentives, they advertise the resources they used to attract investment.  We argue that this is inconsistent with campaign contributions or “fiscal illusion” arguments on politicians using taxpayer money for “inefficient redistribution.”

Kentucky is a great example of this general pattern.  In a quote for the article on the Westlake incentives, Gov. Beshear stated:  “This is an outstanding step forward for Westlake and a tremendous boost for the economy of Calvert City and the surrounding. Kentucky has built a partnership with Westlake and we’re thrilled to see this multi-million dollar investment in the Commonwealth.”

This statement only alludes to these incentives. On the governor’s blog, there are clear statements on incentives, including claims that incentives were important in keeping auto manufacturing jobs in Kentucky.

“I am proud of the efforts of myself and others – including former Mayor Abramson and Sec. Larry Hayes and other members of the state Cabinet for Economic Development – to work with Ford to negotiate the investments and to set up incentives to help make the expansions successful.”

A quick examination of the Governor’s website and the other related organizations for economic development yields the same pattern.  You see an announcement about the Governor welcoming an investment or expansion and then a statement about the incentives used to attract or retain the investment.

To be fair, this is a cherry-picked example of incentives, but I didn’t have to look very hard.  A total of 131 incentives where accounced in Sept and Oct.  $17 million was on the sixth largest thus far (the biggest incentive was a $50 million loan for auto production in Michigan) and 15 deals topped $5 million.  My point is that this illustrates a general pattern we found in our research.

Blogging has been light as the semester kicks off.  But three news stories have highlighted the aftermath of government expropriations of investment.

1.  A few months I provided a link to an article on Sri Lankan government’s decision to expropriate for mostly domestic investors. The scoop (more of a conjecture) from some folks in the political risk industry is that this was the current government punishing investors aligned with the previous government.  But a few foreign brands were collateral damage, including Hilton.  Now there is talk about the government entertaining the idea of compensating some of these investors.

2.  Argentina expropriates a major European oil investment (Spain’s Repsol).  Then they stir the pot by talking about oil exploration in the Falkland Islands.  Now they are in the UK looking for new investors for their expansion plan. You can’t make this stuff up.

3.  Zambian government expropriates South African owned railway.  Then they detain the CEO and General Manager.  I honestly don’t know anything about this dispute, but the detainment definitely raises eyebrows.

In previous posts I’ve outlined my current research (mostly with Eddy Maleksy of Duke) on the politics of tax incentives.  As you can probably tell from the tone of this post and previous posts, I’m not a fan of these incentives.  I think they are wasteful and not very effective in attracting investment.

Below is a list of some incentive announcements from this week in the United States.  For some of them I do some very simple “job accounting” on the cost per job.  This isn’t the best way to analyze the cost-benefit of incentives, but hey, this is a blog post.  This should be the start of a discussion, not a real analysis.

1.  More details on the ongoing “border war” between Kansas and Missouri.  Companies have been enticed by incentives to moved a few miles back and forth between KC, Kansas and KC, Missouri.

2.  AMC crime show set in Detroit pilot gets $1.3 million to film in Detroit.

3.  Durham city council approves $5.7 million incentive for a luxury hotel.  The claims of 200 construction jobs and 150 hotel staff jobs are difficult to evaluate without details on status (full time or part time) and pay.  But this is a pretty high cost per job.

4.  Walgreens gets $47 million in incentives to keep HQ in Chicago.  Part of “Investment Illinois Initative”

5.  “Project Happy Corn” gets $2.3 million for 55 new jobs (over $40k per job).  There has to be a good joke here based on the name.  I got nothing.

6.  Here is list of formal state investment incentive programs.

Ireland using the “gym membership” strategy to increase investment.  Offering benefits for foreign direct investment referrals. 

The UNCTAD World Investment Report was released in early July.  Lots of data on global foreign direct investment flows.  The big story is the global recovery of FDI flows.

Nice summary of an academic paper on investment treaties and foreign direct investment.

Global City Competitiveness Index ranks cities.  Interesting mixes of cities across a number of countries at the top.

A confusing investment dispute between Russia’s Sistema and Indian telecom regulators and Supreme Court.

China’s CNOCC makes bid for $15 billion Canadian oil company.  CNOCC’s Unocal bid in 2005 didn’t go so well.

Blogging has been very light lately, but I wanted to make a couple of quick points about outsourcing.

Oddly enough, the topic of outsourcing seems to be correlated with the electoral calendar.  Academics are quick to point out that the public (and media) often conflate “outsourcing” with “offshoring”.  Fair enough.  But for the sake of brevity let me just focus on “offshore outsourcing”.

Rather than rehash the same simple debates, I though I would point out a few great pieces on outsourcing by academics.  While most of the studies suggest that outsourcing is either a pretty minor issue, or that it has net benefits, there is some nuance in these studies.

A good starting point on the politics of outsourcing is Dan Drezner’s piece and Greg Mankiw’s (long and gated) take on the inside politics of outsourcing.  Some of you may remember that Mankiw basically lost his job as a Bush economic advisor due to some positive comments about outsourcing.  Matt Yglesias has some commentary on the recent Obama-Romney back and forth on outsourcing.  Here is one piece.

What does the academic literature say about outsourcing?  One classic research design is to examine outsourcing at the firm level.  What types of firms outsource?  Do they increase or decrease employment?  In a 2009 American Economic Review piece, Desai, Foley and Hines find that greater expansion abroad by us firms was associated with greater investment and employment at home.   See here for an ungated version.

Ann Harrison and Margaret McMillian have a couple of interesting projects on the topic, and have different findings from the Desai et al piece.  They find that while outsourcing to rich countries can lead to employment creation at home, outsourcing to developing countries has a negative impact on domestic.  For a very readable summary of the previous literature and some new evidence, see this paper.

While I have no doubt that the current debate is driven by politics, it doesn’t mean we can’t use this as an opportunity to have a serious debate on the topic.  My personal take is that outsourcing has a pretty modest impact on US workers (positive or negative) and that any policy interventions to limit outsourcing would most likely have greater negative consequences than they would generate benefits.  For example, I’ve brought up Ted Moran’s work in previous posts.  Moran finds that countries that used “domestic content requirements” or requirements on hiring local workers often coupled these policies with tax incentives or policies to help protect these firms from competition (trade protection).  The net benefits for society were negative, despite the positive ring of using local suppliers and hiring local workers.

The work of Moran was based on the evidence of foreign firms entering into to new markets.  I think there is more limited evidence on how governments can create jobs by harnessing the potential benefits or mitigating the negatives of outsourcing.

1.  Not all expropriations generate revenues.  Government supports sugar industry in Sri Lanka.

2.  Guatemalan President insists new 40% state ownership in mining investments isn’t expropriation.

3.  Glencore mining operations nationalized in Bolivia.

4.  Hungary wins investment arbitration case.

5.  Indonesia goes to court over $2 billion mining dispute.

6.  Debates on mining nationalization in South Africa.

The recent announcement that Airbus will open there first US manufacturing facility in Mobile, Alabama intersects a couple of areas of interest.  A few quick points.

1. The state of Alabama and city of Mobile offered lots of economic incentives to lure this investment.  The grand total is expected to be $158 million for 1,000 jobs ($158,000 per direct jobs).  I’ve talked to people in state economic development over the years and they often claim that the indirect jobs for certain types of manufacturing are much greater than the direct jobs.  The estimates for auto production is that that each auto production job producers another 7-8 upstream or downstream jobs.   But this is a very large incentive package.
2. Boeing and Airbus have been in a nasty competition over the years.  This goes beyond commercial aircraft to a controversy over a refueling tanker.  Airbus originally won the contract but this was eventually overturned and the contract was given to Boeing.

3. Boeing and Airbus have been in constant WTO disputes.  The short of it is that both Boeing and Airbus have been receiving subsidies inconsistent with WTO rules.  Great blog post with some links on the most recent dispute.

There is some really interesting political science and economics research that has examined how inward investment affects domestic politics.  The short of it is that foreign investment can be used to “jump” trade protection.  This classic example is Japanese automobile investment.

This investment can also defuse trade protection or other forms of legislation that could be harmful to the company’s interests.  See here for a great paper on the topic (gated).

The short of it is, this seems like a shrewd (and costly) political strategy for Airbus.  Building aircraft in the US will certainly give the company a few political allies in the United States, and could help open doors for government procurement contracts in the future.