Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics

Volume 4, Issue 3, September 2007

In this issue:

Welcome to the September 2007 issue of Econ Journal Watch. EJW is a triannual peer-reviewed journal for scholarly commentary on academic economics.

Comments

  • Smoking bans: The Contemporary Economic Policy Best Article of 2004 award went to a paper by Benjamin Alamar and Stanton Glantz finding that smoking bans are good for restaurant owners. David Henderson criticizes the theory and empirics. Alamar and Glantz reply.
  • Moral hazards: Gary Richardson takes a careful look at a paper in the Journal of Economic History, and sees moral hazard working in more ways than identified. The authors Linda Hooks and Kenneth Robinson reply.
  • Does the Earned Income Tax Credit discourage work in the phase-out? Paul Trampe argues that the phase-out effects have not been adequately examined. Hilary Hoynes replies.

Economics in Practice

  • Got replicability? Replicability champion Bruce McCullough says editors need to graduate from gestures to serious commitments to make the empirical results published in their journals reproducible. Here he examines the online archive of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and concludes that the journal is still failing to achieve empirical accountability.
  • Creative destruction—We just can’t kill the damned thing! Schumpeter’s model-defying idea of creative destruction might be alien to top econ journals and textbooks, but is thriving at Amazon. Arthur Diamond uses Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” feature to gather evidence that creative destruction is an idea in ample supply in bookstores, especially the Business section.

Character Issues

  • Stand!—Economists against Smoot-Hawley: In the day, 1028 economists of diverse stripes joined in protest of impending trade restrictions. Here we reproduce Paul Douglas’s memoir, Frank W. Fetter’s account (originally published in the American Economic Review), and the petition and list of signatories as printed in the Congressional Record, 1930.

Correspondence

  • John Quiggin asks: Why should we care what Klein and Romero say about the Journal of Economic Theory?

Download and Print Entire September 2007 Issue (78 pages, 1.1 MB)