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.

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.