Home Again

I made it back to Arlington yesterday afternoon. After dining on German food for two months, Cindy expected that I would have a desire for Mexican food and so had tamales ready for me last night. Good call. Cindy, the boys, and I exchanged 'news.' Their worlds went on without me - amazing. I fear that I am becoming increasingly irrelevant. I am writing this at my office. I caught up with colleagues and, while I have been having what I considered a unique and incredible adventure, it may be a minor blip compared to all that has happened here. It seems that everyone has traveled far and wide. While I am glad for them that they are enjoying themselves, once again, my own estimation of my self-importance is somewhat deflated.

After diner, it was amazing how quickly we settled back into normal routines and accepted roles. Some routine is good but some is not (ruts?). I am going to try to resist waiting around for something to happen by simply watching TV. This trip has been wonderful and rewarding but professionally and personally. The overall lesson that I learned and hope to implement is that, life is too short to sit around and wait for something to happen. It is not that difficult to make something interesting happen. It takes a bit of coordination with others, but the rewards are there.

This is the last post on this blog. I hope you all enjoyed the photos and my stories. There is a chance I will return to blogging in the Fall on a professional economics blog but we will see.

ICT Conference

The ICT conference at the ZEW has been quite good. It has been better in past years but I still learned a lot here. Even better, I got some good comments on my paper that could help solve a problem I was stuck on. I think I was able to provide useful comments on a number of papers, which helps assuage my conscience that it was worth their inviting me. No presentation that I saw was just aweful and no one presented a pure policy polemic (though one came close).

A highlight of the conference was the conference dinner last night. This was in a small winery in the small town of Deidesheim nearby. The winery was in operation 800 years ago, owned by the bishop, but was bought and rebuilt by the current family after it was destroyed by Napoleon's army in 1804. The owner, along with his ~10 year old son, gave us lessons on wines and we tasted six different wines they produce. Dinner was actually served in the wine cellar. In true European fashion, we returned back to Mannheim from this dinner at about 11:30pm.

After the last session and lunch, we all said our goodbyes. It is a beautiful afternoon and I don't think anyone was much in a hurry to do anything but sip cofffee on the terrace. Irene and the ICT folks were each individually very gracious in their good byes. Collectively, they gave me some Mannheimer Dreck, a local dessert, and a ZEW teeshirt to take home which I will wear with pride. I offered room and board if any of them come through the Dallas area (and two or three moved to pull out their calendars). Honestly, we have an extra room and it would be no problem. Two weeks ago I was homesick, but now I am not - go figure. Since I will be back in Arlington, this is the last entry until Monday.

Work Progress

ICT conference at ZEW. I am catching up with some old acquaintances and make some new ones. There are some decent papers but, on the whole, past conferences here have been better. I 'chaired' a session, which means that I was the time keeper and referee for the Q&A, and I discussed another paper. On some other papers, I was able to offer some nice comments. At least the recipients took them as nice comments. We have a dinner tonight and my presentation is in the morning.

2/5

Work Progress

Thurs: Preparing for conference tomorrow. This means reading the slides for my presentation and preparing slides for my discussion of another paper. (How to be kind and/or helpful when you do not think much of the paper?)

Conference 'get together' in the evening.
2/5

Work Progress

Wed.: Teaching myself selection models (with some success!)

2/5

Tuesday and back to work

Did not get much done today. I am editing slides for my presentation on Saturday and reading the paper I am to discuss on Friday. I am also tinkering with the Journals analysis but nothing too serious.

1/5

Monday we Stormed the Castle(s)

Here is the crew I signed on when we took a short break on our 2km hike to the Burg Eltz.

Here is the best view of Burg Eltz. This castle has been owned by the same family for 33 generations. It was one of the few not torn down by the French in their 1689 because the family had connections with the French. This is one of the few that has artifacts and rooms from the 12th century. Way cool.

This is the interior courtyard.
This is a water spout in the form of a dragon.


A fair maid and maiden (seeking a rescue maybe?).

Then we went to the Schloss in Cochem. This schloss was destroyed and then bought and rebuilt by an industrialist 100 years ago as a Summer home. It is a bit more modern but still interesting. This is a courtyard at the top with an out building an a very deep well.

This hanging object d'art (carved antlers) is suppose to give you luck if you touch the red spot. I hope it was good luck.

The view downstream.

The view upstream.

A terrace jutting out from the castle with those magnificant views.

A mural on the keep of the Schloss.
Here is our Hotel Haus Lipmann from the river side. Behind the tree to the right is the dining terrace shaded by grape vines. Really an idyllic setting.

And here is the hotel back from the back courtyard. My room is the one in the middle with the window open.

Sunday to Beilstein (via Cochem)

The original plan for Sunday was for my brother Jon to pick me up at the Cochem train station 10km from Beilstein where they would be staying. But they are traveling with kids and didn't think they would get in til evening (good prediction). So I decided to get a little hiking training in for my upcoming Philmont trip, packed my backpack and hiked along the Mösel to Beilstein. (I had always wanted to backpack through Europe. Does a mere 10km before staying in a nice hotel when you are 46 count?)

The train ride along the Mösel was gorgeous and Cochem was a charming town. Here are some hotels on the river just across from Cochem
And the upstream part of the town itself.

The walk allowed me to look back and get a picture of the bridge, which even this was cute.
I passed two or three villages along my walk. The valley is quite steep and wherever there was a flat spot near the river, there would be a settlement. Many of these now flourish on the tourist industry with charming little guesthouses or hotels, all with window boxes full of petunias and impatiens and terraces shaded by grape vines hanging above the tables.

When I did get to Beilstein, I ate, rested and then explored the ruin of a castle just behind it.
Another artsy photo trying to exploit the sun.
The keep of the castle was still standing and I was able to climb this and see for miles.

This is looking down river. Notice the pedestrian and car ferry in the lower left of the photo.

My hotel was on the river behind the first little dock sticking into the water. The village church to the right dominated the village.

Just as I finished this tour and was down by the river, Jon pulled up and said "howdy stranger." We caught up, I played with the kids, we toured the village (10 minutes if you walk slow) and sat down on the terrace for dinner. Here is Jon (notice a resemblance?)
His beautiful wife Andrea.
The fair maiden Cecelia (who turned eight in Paris just a week before).
And Mathew in a perfectly appropriate pose for a five year old boy.

That night, we watched the valiant German team go down to defeat at the hands of the Spanish 1-0. I am pretty new to soccer commentary, but even I could see that Spain played better. As Jon said, they seemed to always be a step ahead of the Germans.

Saturday in Koblenz

This weekend it was Koblenz before I met my brother and his family further on down the Mösel River in the village of Beilstein. Koblenz has a population of 100,000 and was settled by the Romans in 9BC. Its name derives from the Romans "confluence" because it is situated where the Mösel meets the Rhein. This is a wonderful location for some emperial propoganda and so Wilhem II erected a huge statue of his grandfather,Wilhem I, looking out over all the river going traffic coming up the Rhine.

The horse alone is 9m high. I climbed up into the base where one can see the confluence. Kinda looks like the foc'sul of a battleship, no?
There were some wonderful churches. This is a newer one.
Thus is from the 12 century. Notice I am still trying for the artsy look with the sun peaking through.
They do have a sense of humor. The base flows continously into a basin, but this 'spitting boy' fountain expectorates a few seconds every minute or so on to the pavement. This family could not convince their daughter to stand in just the right spot.
This is the base of a tall fountain (my full shot did not come out well). This is a wine boat carrying the town through history (quite apt to). The different layers of the vertical reflect the different time periods from Roman, middle ages, Holy Roman Empire, French occupation in 1689, Loyalist refuge during the French Revolution, Prussian, Weimar, WWII, and present. The depiction for WWII is simply destruction which was pretty acurate if I remember my WWII right. But being demolished is something that happened a few times here, mostlty by the French. It was sacked and destroyed by the Normans in 892. It was stormed by the French in 1632. Besieged by them in 1688. And taken by the French Revolutionary army in 1794. Then bombed to rubble by us in WWII.

Koblenz has a dozen or so pedestrian only blocks that connect about three or four platz. Here is one with a beir garten.
Here is another with shops and cafes.
This is the Rathaus on the right. I shoul remember who the statue is but I don't (it is in my tourist info). On the yellow building on the left you can see two strings of bells that are used to chime the hours.
I have been pretty lucky with hotels near train stations. This is great in big cities because you can get to it if you arrive late and you know it will be near a metro hub. I made the mistake of doing the same in Koblenz. The problem was that the train tracks are not submerged and I heard freight traffic all night long. It is a small enough city that I should have found a hotel nearer a platz.

Work Progress

I cleaned up some little estimator stuff on the journals project and reran with bootstrapped standard errors and shipped off to my coauthor.

I have been following up on another project. I recalled survey data of US teens that, among other things, ask about video game usage and getting into fights. I have been teaching myself matchng models and am confirming my previous results. Cool again.

4/5

Work Progress

Not much progress today. I went back and checked on some bad matches and found a small coding error. However, since this was at an early step, rerunning all the subsequent steps is taking all day (and is not done yet at 8pm).

I did spend a good chunk of today and yesterday reading one of Marianne Saam's papers and providing her with some feedback. Not a bad paper but could use a bit more rigorous thinking about certain issues.

2/5

Work Progress

Since I got the data to match, I have been running regressions. First, I examine whether JSTOR affected economists citing patterns. I have 44,000 articles from 83 journals since 1985 where the first author is from a decent research institution (i.e., the 400+ that published 25+ articles in these journals over this time period). For each published article, I know the number of journals the author had access to through JSTOR and the number of his references that are from one of these journals.

1. With fixed effects for institution, citing journal, and year, I find that the number of JSTOR journals one cites to increases when the author obtains access to more JSTOR journals. In fact, I find that there are diminishing returns to adding access to more journals. This occurs for 'top' institutions and more mediocre institutions.
2. JSTOR access to more journals 'crowds out' references that are not available through JSTOR at about one-tenth the rate. And this also displays a diminishing rate.
3. Working paper and 'in press' citations increase over time but not with JSTOR. These are now findable over the Internet but not through JSTOR.

The really cool stuff is when I look at 'research productivity.' I aggregated all these articles by institution and year into some 10,000 observations to see if JSTOR increased the rate of publication. For the raw count of publications (controling for institution, journal and year fixed effects) publications rise and at decreasing rate when an author has access to more JSTOR journals. Cool! I need to investigate whether there is a differential effect for different quality of institutions. (Presumably, researchers at better institutions had better resources with which to find these citable articles.) I also want to investigated quality as well as quantity of articles. The usual measure is the citation weighted number of publications.

OK, so this is just economic research - who cares. But, suppose the same holds true in biology, physics, medicine, engineering, etc. Then it might be possible to claim that the Internet has increased the pace of academic research output. This university research is the precursor to the industrial innovation and invention that have increased our standards of living (See Ward & Dranove (1995)). If these results for economics hold-up and generalize, we might be in the midst of the golden age of research.

All in all, a banner day.

4/5

Travels from Munich

A delightful little incident on the train trip back from Munich led to a flood of memories and some realizations. In Stuttgart, a group of a half-dozen women of a certain age, as they say, came on board and sat across from me at a table and a row behind. They were laughing and carrying on as they found their seats. As soon as the train started, they uncorked some champagne and had to uncork more 10 minutes later. Following each cork popping there was surprised laughter and giggles. They were obviously telling stories and making jokes, laughing at and with each other, and laughing at their laughing.

I remembered my mom and her friends just like this. When I was growing up, never do any two of my mom's friends meet without a belly laugh for some reason. They still meet up but the laughter is little diminished. Such wonderful memories.

Well, I was reading a book but got this little grin on my face at every exclamation and they noticed it and thought that I was in on all the jokes. Eventually, I had to explain that "Ich bin ein touriste und ich nich sprecken sie Deutche" ("I am a tourist and I do not speak Germain" I think). At which point, they realized that I was just enjoying that they were enjoying themselves. They offered me a glass. I refused at first, but allowed myself to be persuaded. That followed some broken English and even more broken German as we did our best to communicate. It was a housewives party whatever that means. It was a short visit , about ten minutes, because my stop was next.

The incident crystallized an issue I have been groping with while I am over here. This has been a wonderful opportunity for me to travel and I have tried to make the most of it. But traveling alone sucks. The point of new discoveries is sharing them with loved ones. I want to discuss these things with Cindy and the boys, gain insights and maybe share some. Meet up at dinner and compare thoughts. That is what the blog is all about to some degree, I suppose, but the discussion is a little one-sided. I guess I have to admit I am getting lonely. I am a pretty independent guy and can be contented by myself for quite some time. My major consolation, I suspect, is that, if I did not travel on weekends, and just stayed in Mannheim and moped around, I would be even more lonely.

Travels to Munich II

On Sunday, I got batteries and went back and got a few pictures where my camera had failed me. Here is the north side of the Residenz, facing the Hof Garten.

Here is a seen from that garden (notice that my second attempt at an artsy photo worked a little better). The photo cuts off that the structure there is domed (so the photo did not work that well). The people walking away in the photo are musicians who will set up inside the structure and play for donations.
I spent most of the day in the art museums - the Alte Pinakothek (Old Art Museum), Neue Pinakothek (New Art Museum) and Pinakothek der Moderne (Museum of Modern Art), all within a stones throw of each other. The Old had pre-Renaissance and early Renaissance, the New had later Renaissance through Impressionism and some Post-Impressionism, and the Modern had weird stuff.

OK, I can get my head around "classic modern" (say pre-war or even pre-1960s) but, what is now called contemporary art, loses its connection with art. For example, one huge display (40m x 10m) hanging 5m from the ceiling was a series of metal baskets containing clothes and such attached to ropes and chains as with theater curtains. What does it mean? Oh to find that out, you had to spend five minutes reading the artist's description of its symbolism. I read it and it made sense. I may not agree but that is not my problem with contemporary art. However, at some point, the written word conveys more information that the visual representation. Then again, I may just be a Philistine.

My favorite was the Neue Pinakothek. It contained the famous artists we all have learned about (David, de Goya, Delecroix, Gainesborough, Monet). What I enjoyed were some of the lesser known artists whose styles were variations on these themes. Of course, the museum did have a number of German and Munich School paintings. These paintings and variations were new to me (see wikipedia). I bought a museum book but I guess I did not look at it closely enough. Many of the paintings I liked so much did not make it into the book.

However, six hours (with breaks) in three museums did me in for the day. I returned in the late afternoon instead of the originally planned early evening.

Travels to Munich I

I let work early on Friday and took a train to Munich about 360 km (225 mi) in three hours. From my apartment to the hotel in four hours with no airport hassle, no driving and hot coffee serve to my seat - how cool is that?

I got in around 8:00 Friday and walked around the Marianplatz (the main pedestrian area) to get a meal and scout out the next day. On Saturday, I walked all over. First, I went to Assamkirche, a sumptuous church in which there is not a square foot without some sort of elaborate ornamentation.
Next, I went by the Viktualienmarkt, a daily victualing market like none I had ever seen before. Initially gourmet restaurants would buy their fresh foods here. Now, everyone comes to the 140 stalls of vegetables, fruits, flowers, meats, spices, cheese, fish, juices etc. Here are two stalls.

A short walk to Marianplatz, the main square, which is dedicated to the virgin Mary. The dominant structure here is the Neue Rathaus (New Town Hall).


The Frauenkirche (full name Dom zu unserer lieben Frau) is magnificent. You do not quite get how big it is until you are right on top of it. Here is the front door, five times the size of a human.

The square in front is small, so this is all the perspective I could get from there.

Here is a stained glass window.
I toured the Residenz (the palace of the rulers of Bavaria). Unfortunately, my camera's batteries lost their juice just before I entered the Residenz. This tour was extensive with many wonderful rooms. Wikipedia offers a couple of photos though. The first is the Antiquarium, a huge vault holding antique statues used later as a banquet hall.


Another photo is from the Treasury Museum attached to the Residenz tour and depicts a 16th century jewel encrusted statue of Saint George slaying the dragon.



I was able to climb the tower of the Alter Peter kirche (Saint Peters Church) just beside Marianplatz. This finally prvides some perspective on the Rathaus and Frauenkirche.


Finally, as I went back to the hotel, I saw a street artist in Marianpltaz painting a picture of Marianplatz as it might have looked 200 years ago. Pretty cool.

Off to Munich

I will leave this afternoon to spend the weekend in Munich for a site seeing jaunt. Don't know if I will be blogging, but I will return with photos and impressions.

Rough Crowd

I gave my talk on "Video Games, Violence, and Crime" at the ZEW yesterday. I got lots of comments and questions about my data and methods. Most indicate little things I should have done or I could do further. But some of them could be quite damning to the whole enterprise. By the end, even I was starting to lose doubt in my results. By far, these were the best comments I have ever got on this paper. This is what research is all about. Thank you very much.

Work Progress

Success! I finally got the data to match. I now have a dataset with the articles from 80 top economics journals from 1985 to 2007 written by folks affiliated with the top 500 or more institutions worldwide and can tell how many of their references were available through JSTOR. My rudimentary empirical work indicates that articles with more references available through JSTOR both have more references (indicating that JSTOR affects citation patterns) and are themselves cited more often (indicating that JSTOR increases the "quality" of an article). To do is to see if JSTOR increases article output or not and to do all the econometrics right (lots of fixed effects).

Before that though, I need to ship off the matched data and the data description to my coauthor. This task will wait until tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, I will present my "Video Games, Violence, and Crime" here paper at the ZEW tomorrow afternoon.

5/5

How big is football in Europe?

From Division of Labor we have:

The renowned Vienna State Opera canceled one performance and complained about dismal attendance at another, blaming the European soccer championship being played in the Austrian capital.

Performances are usually nearly sold out, but the opera house said 29 percent of its seats went unsold for its most recent event, Verdi's "La forza del destino." The opera house also said it had decided to cancel a ballet evening June 29, the day when the final is played in Vienna.

Officials said in a statement Tuesday that would-be visitors fear negotiating through masses of soccer fans in downtown Vienna.

It is something of an understatement to say that, in the US, there is not much overlap between the opera crowd and the football crowd.

The closest might be Vikings games which often feature hefty fans in horned helmets yelling at the top of their lungs.

I wonder if he is an opera buff?

Video Game Paper Publicity

I was interviewed last week by a reporter from Sweden about my video game paper. The result is my femton noterar av berömmelse ("fifteen minutes of fame" in Swedish). See here. I ran it through a babel-fish translator and it seems accurate. Being a diligent reporter, he got input from psychologists too. What surprised me is that their study seems to be consistent with my findings. See video clip here.

Sunday in Stuttgart

Stuttgart is about 40 minutes away by train and I have these Eurail days to use up, so I headed over there for the day. Because I am a guy, I went to the Porche museum (I did not have time to go to the Mercedes Museum too). Honey, here is my next car.

Here is my first car.

This is across from the New Schloss and where I had lunch. When it started to pour, I brought my meal inside.

Here is the new Schloss, which is 200-250 years old. The old Schloss dates back to 950.


This is the modern art museum, nicknamed the "cube." I liked the featured exhibit more than the regular stuff.

This is my attempt at an artsy photo from within the cube. My talents lie elsewhere.

A digression

I have discovered that almost all German cities have wonderful public places. Most of my colleagues in Mannheim complain that it is not a very pretty city and, compared to the local competition, it is not. However, they have made the best of what they have. The Rathaus, Paradeplatz, Planken, and Wassarturm areas are nicer than any comparable place in Arlington, Dallas, Fort Worth, etc. And they use their public spaces extensively. Every evening the cafe crowds flow out onto the sidewalks and squares with tables where one can get coffee, beer, or ice cream if not a full meal. The difference in cities is how much they were endowed with natural beauty, historical significance, or how well the spaces have been managed (over hundreds of years). Mannheim is not so well endowed, Heidelberg, Wien and Zürich are. Even then, Mannheim blows Arlington out of the water.

Stuttgart is somewhere in between. The public places are lovely and obviously well loved. I get the feeling, though, that it is trying to be a major city rather than the middle tier that it is. It is home to about 600,000 people about the same size as Fort Worth. Come to think of it, Fort Worthers seem to share this ambivalence with being a comfortable small city or a major metropolitan area. (Arlington also would like to be thought of as a bigger player than it is and it is half the size of Fort Worth. Arlington's unofficial motto is "We're nobody's damn suburb," which, of course, means that it is.)