Mike in Mannheim

Home Again

2008-07-07T17:51:00.002+02:00

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

2008-07-05T15:13:00.003+02:00

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

2008-07-04T18:24:00.002+02:00

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

2008-07-04T18:21:00.002+02:00

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

2008-07-04T18:20:00.001+02:00

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

2/5

Tuesday and back to work

2008-07-02T17:23:00.002+02:00

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)

2008-07-02T16:11:00.017+02:00

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)

2008-07-01T15:47:00.017+02:00

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

2008-07-01T15:05:00.011+02:00

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

2008-06-27T20:26:00.002+02:00

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

2008-06-26T20:01:00.002+02:00

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

2008-06-25T21:02:00.003+02:00

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.

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.
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.
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

2008-06-23T15:38:00.004+02:00

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

2008-06-23T15:08:00.003+02:00

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

2008-06-23T14:01:00.013+02:00

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

2008-06-20T14:24:00.003+02:00

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

2008-06-20T14:18:00.003+02:00

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

2008-06-18T17:38:00.003+02:00

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?

2008-06-18T10:22:00.005+02:00

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

2008-06-16T10:11:00.004+02:00

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

2008-06-16T08:19:00.011+02:00

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.)

Work Progress

2008-06-16T08:16:00.002+02:00

I spent all Saturday stumped. There my data just were not merging right. So I spent all day debugging my programs (and finding a few really stupid mistakes, one after the other). Finally, after hours of staring at errors, at the end of the day, the institution names matched. Woo-hoo. Onto journal names and to JSTOR info.

4/5

Farmer's Market

2008-06-14T09:20:00.005+02:00

Mannheim has a farmer's market in the plaza in front of the Rathaus (city hall) every Saturday, Tuesday and Thursday morning. I went this morning to get fruit and to take in all the colors and smells. Great fruits and vegetables, but also flowers, breads, cheeses, meats, and wines.

I wonder if Arlington could pull this off?

Innovation Conference

2008-06-14T08:44:00.002+02:00

On Friday, the "real" economists came to present their research. Many of these papers are well done or interesting (and a few are both). However, I must say, I think I liked the "students' sessions" better. There may have been a slight quality difference, but they appear to be much more willing to engage in discussion about the topic and not convince themselves that their findings are the definitive "truth." Perhaps the academic economists' papers are substantially better, but my expectations were higher still. Or, perhaps, after five days of hearing papers on the economics of innovation, I am burned out on the topic. Some of these seem to be asking many of the same questions or using the same data from different countries. Or, perhaps, one bad apple spoiled the bunch (see below).

There are a few "big wigs" at all conferences. Most papers are presented in parallel sessions but the big timers will usually get the whole conference attendance as an audience. Most of the time, this is efficient because the big timers usually got that way because they are smart, hardworking and have access to data, resources and good RAs. For example, at the Milan conference, the talks by Dixit, Sutton and Anderson were all excellent and substantially increased the value added of the conference. Most of us look forward to hearing what the smart, industrious, and resourceful people in our field have to say.

However, without mentioning names, I had to walk out on one big timer at this conference. First, the presentation was technically poor (too many duplicative slides, poorly prepared slides, main points made verbally and not mentioned in slides, bad speaking voice & too many digressions). I can tolerate some of this as many of us are offenders. Second, and worse, the talk was on a policy issue and the speaker was obviously sympathetic of one-side and dismissive of the other side. OK, so I know your priors, what is your evidence? Oh, you only measure costs and not benefits. It appears as though the big timer is saying, because of my stature, you can trust my claims even when they are not supported by evidence. Sorry, I got better things to do than to be patronized.

The upside is that I got some work done (see, opportunity cost was positive). I think I found a work-around for my large file size problem.

Work Progress 3/5

Football

2008-06-12T20:08:00.003+02:00

The Summer School ended today and the conference begins tomorrow. Because Germany played in the Euro 2008 tournament, the ZEW projected the game onto the big screen in the conference room and provided beer. Lots of fun, but too bad Germany lost to Croatia.

Work progress 0/5

Back to School

2008-06-11T19:29:00.003+02:00

I have been busy attending Summer School. The ZEW is holding a Summer Workshop on "The Economics and Econometrics of Innovation." My research is getting back to these issues and so it is useful to get up to speed with the current issues, data and methods. So, I am in "class" with all "the other" graduate students and new Ph.Ds. Morning sessions are by established researchers summarizing a line of research and afternoons are "student" presentations. I got a few good ideas on how to solve some problems with projects I am working on. I am also able to provide some comments to the other "students" on their projects. Some of them are helpful.

[Note to my kids who like their Summers free from school. Dad is weird. He likes school. Since dad has his doctorate (and, more importantly, tenure) he does not have to get any more education. But he is still choosing to go to summer school. Here is hoping that my kids will be similarly weird.]

After the Summer School, the ZEW is hosting a conference on "The Impact of Regulation on Investment and Innovation Incentives." That will be fun to attend too.

Anyway, I am only able to work on my own stuff in the evenings and am not getting much done.
Work progress:
Monday 1/5
Tuesday 0/5
Wednesday 1/5

Zürich in 24 hours

2008-06-11T08:35:00.008+02:00

I am a little late in posting but I have been busy. The train ride through the Alps was amazing. I doubt still pictures could do them justice. (Also, the window was somewhat stained.) I just could not imagine how rugged the terrain would be. My hat is off to Hannibal. The other aspect that this California boy kept marveling at all that water. Every crease in every cliff had a waterfall.

I got to Zürich at about 1pm and did the walk about. In the afternoon, I got caught up in the football match. I did go to the usual sites and got some of the usual photos. The city (at least the old city) is on either side of the Limmat River flowing out of Lake Zürich and there are a number of canals running through the city. Water is a major theme. And clocks. And hills. I also tried to get away from the commotion and was rewarded with quieter locations that were very pleasant.

Zürich is beautiful and expensive (Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills has nothing on Bannhofstrasse).

European Football Championships

2008-06-07T21:24:00.006+02:00

I did not realize that when I booked this stop in Zurich, that it would be the opening day of the soccer championship hosted in Zurich featuring the Swiss national team. Needless to say, it has been kind of crazy here. Lots of fun. Lots of streets blocked off for pedestrian carnival antics. When you arrive at the train station, you see this huge statue inside the entrance.
Every kiosk selling beer, and there are dozens, has a TV and a crowd watching the game.

And here I am at the fanzone.

What a View of Milano

2008-06-07T21:10:00.007+02:00

I thought going downtown was meeting up at a bar. Turns out it was at the conference organizer's place. And what a place. Federico Etro was a delightful host and ran a good conference. He lives in the top floor apartment in a swanky part of town. The apartment is great itself, with two floors, but the best part has to be the private rooftop terrace. Here is a neighbor's garden.
Down his front street.
His view of the Duomo a half mile away.

Milan Conference

2008-06-06T18:26:00.001+02:00

A quick note because Internet access is limited. I made it to Milan after 10 long hours from Wien. The best part was going through the Austrian and Italian Alps.

The conference is now over. So far I have not been anywhere but the hotel and conference activities. (OK, one of these activities was a really nice dinner yesterday.) Tonight, I will go with a few of the folks I met for dinner downtown for a look around.

On to Milano

2008-06-04T08:22:00.004+02:00

I won't get there until about 9pm (21:00 for all us Europeans). But I have a one hour "layover" in Innsbruck. Just enough time to stick my head out of the train station to gaze at the Alps. But not enough time to see the city. I am not sure my next hotel(s) will have Internet access so this may the last post for a while.

Kunsthistorisches in the PM

2008-06-03T20:05:00.005+02:00

The Kunsthistorisches Museum is known for its many paintings by the Renaissance masters. Also of interest to me were the historical artistic collections. These included ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine collections. (Alas, another museum was displaying a King Tut exhibit but I did not have time to visit it.) I always marvel at the abilities of these masters (of all these ages), but I am much more of a museum hound than anyone else in my family.

No photos from inside, but outside there was a cross-advertisement for the King Tut exhibit and some sort of soccer thingy they keep going on and on about. The 10 meter high statue is wearing the Austrian colors.

Schönbrunn in the AM

2008-06-03T19:35:00.006+02:00

Schloss Schönbrunn is fabulous.

Obviously modeled on Versailles, it sometimes surpasses and sometimes falls short. The rooms are simply sumptuous. I do not know when I have seen so much gold leaf. The tour is quite extensive and this time, the self-guided tour focuses on Empress Maria Theresa because it was given to her and she used it extensively.

However, those who know me will not be surprised that I enjoyed the gardens best of all. These are just a few of the images I saw and fewer still that I captured. A rose covered archway 50 meters long.

The formal gardens.There is a temporary band shell set up for a concert tonight. This obstructs the giant fountain of Neptune.

At the top of the hill behind the gardens is Gloriette, and the name is not an exageration.

Note to Self

2008-06-02T20:10:00.000+02:00

Sunscreen

Wien day two

2008-06-02T18:00:00.005+02:00

So I did day one of the tourist thing. I did all the things my family hates about me on vacations.

I walked a lot.
No, I mean a lot - including museum corridors, possibly 10 miles or more.
I went to stuffy old art and history museums.
I constantly changed my mind on what to do next.
I got turn around (at least once), but insisted on figuring it out myself rather than asking anyone.
I missed a metro stop and had to backtrack.

I travel this way this because I don't have to worry about what they will say and, as a consequence, I don't have them to remind me how to travel more sensibly.

In the morning, I went to the Imperial Palace. A nice thing they did to personalize the tour was to take you through the life of Empress Elizabeth (or "Sisi"). Then I walked the Ringstrasse, a loop around the old city that oozes the Viennese lifestyle. I took particular care to see the University of Vienna, where THE Austrian School of Economics started. I stopped for lunch at a cafe - I had only had a pastry for breakfast and was hungry. I ate well but decided to have a beer with it. A mistake. All I wanted afterward was a nap. Instead, I just dawdled over lunch for a while to recover.

Then, onto the Belvedere, a magnificent schloss and now an art museum. I came back downtown for my afternoon coffee and am resting before going out in the evening. I hope to stick my toe in the Danube. It won't be blue for long.

Wunderbar Wien!

2008-06-02T17:42:00.006+02:00

My new favorite city is gorgeous. When I first saw Paris, I did not know that a city, the whole city, could be so aesthetically pleasing. I grew up acculturated with the typical American disdain for the French (Their tanks have three gears in reverse. The French salute is the Nazi salute but with two arms, yuck, yuck, yuck). But then I saw Paris and I understood why it was just not worth having any battles there. Paris is more beautiful than than my impressions of London, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, and definitely Washington, DC. Now that I have seen Vienna, I place it on a par with Paris. However, the Viennese appear to be much more comfortable with their city and their history than are the Parisians.

What makes the comparison fair is that there is a distinct Viennese style of architecture just as there is a distinct Parisian style (my father, the architect, could actually name them for me). The photos here make my point. In both cases, each successive building reflects that style, reinterprets it, builds on it, adds a new twist but does not fundamentally alter the concept. So on any street corner, you can look around and see variations on a theme. You walk down a block or two and the variations have changed but the theme is still there. Now this is difficult to maintain into the 21st century, I admit, but even there, the modern styles are designed not to clash with the old.

This reflecting the old is taken quite literally in the famous Hass-Haus

directly opposite St. Stephen cathedral.

Getting to Wien

2008-06-01T21:09:00.004+02:00

I got here pretty uneventfully after a seven hour train ride. It was very comfortable though. I found my hotel, Hotel Stadhalle, (conveniently located three blocks from the train station). It is a nice little hotel with a beautiful courtyard (see below) and wireless Internet access (hence this post).

I got settled around 6pm and decided to head downtown to look around and eat dinner (by 3-day metro ticket museum reduction package) and when I got there it started raining. OK, I will duck under the ubiquitous huge umbrellas that cafe's put out and have dinner. Well, rain tuned to thunder, and a then a downpour, and then hail! Interesting at first but, as in increased, each patron gradually moved inside as the awnings strained under the pressure. Waiting it out my be an excuse for me to have a beer perhaps.

The upside is that, in the hustle, I got to talking with a nice young couple who have immigrated to Austria from the Philippines. Very fun discussion - they where proud of the current California governor (an Austrian you see) and asked me who I supported in the election. I steered away from politics, especially when they asked how Bush ever got elected. Finally the rain stopped an I returned to the hotel. Big day planned for tomorrow.

Work Progress

2008-05-31T18:27:00.002+02:00

Today I tied up loose ends before my trip to Wien, Milano and Zürich. I made comments on a paper Jenny gave me to read. I wanted to get this back to her before I left. And I made my slides for my discussion in Milano. Well, I got them mostly done.

3/5

Park along the Rhine

2008-05-31T18:17:00.005+02:00

On the map, I could tell that there was a park not far from my office. But, because there is a train yard in between, I did not know how to get there. So I asked . Here are some photos (that don't do it justice. There is a track (how many meters around?) where I will try to go jogging every now and again.Looking up the Rhine
and down the Rhine

Stadtfest (City Party)

2008-05-31T17:53:00.005+02:00

This weekend is Mannheim's Stadtfest, a big party nominally for the kids but there will be lots of beer and music into the night. They set up tents and vendors all along the planken, the pedestrian mall downtown. The Germans sure know how to throw a party. I walked over this afternoon to check it out. Here is a picture looking one way ...and here is looking the other way.
This is the main stage, there are two others, being set up.
I will go back tonight to see what it is like when the kiddies go to bed. I won't stay up too late as I leave for Wien tomorrow morning.

Work Progress

2008-05-31T17:48:00.002+02:00

Forgot to post yesterday. Probably because of a disappointing setback. The ISI journal database is just too big at 2 million citations. My computer crashed. Next week, they will install a computer for me to use that has more memory. If that does not work, I will have to process in chunks. Bummer.

1/5

Planning to meet up With Jon

2008-05-29T18:16:00.002+02:00

My brother Jon and his family will be vacationing in France and into Germany late next month. We just exchanged emails trying to see if we can meet up. They have found a charming family run hotel on the Mosel river that is between Mannheim and Trier, not far. These are photos from the hotel's homepage.

I will try to go to Trier on this little jaunt.

Work Progress

2008-05-29T18:01:00.002+02:00

I checked my work from yesterday - some minor mistakes that I have fixed. And I have written the code that attaches the institution key to match from one dataset to the other. I forgot, and this is really dumb, that I also need to match on journal. The whole exercise is that some institutions have access to some journals at a point in time. So, I have started to aggregate all of the cited references and parse the fields into cited year, author and journal. This is a computer intensive task and I have just set the other computer to work on this all night. After this, I will have to again map all of the misspellings of journal names into a common format for merging. This will not be as tedious because there are at most 300 relevant journals whereas there were 2,500 research related institutions. Progress is being made.

4/5

Work Progress

2008-05-28T20:10:00.002+02:00

After days of mind-numbingly dull work, I finally have a key to match institution names in the journals dataset to journals in the JSTOR dataset. I am a little worried because my casual observation of the data suggests that JSTOR does not appear randomly across institutions. I might be able to deal with the selection issue with some instruments. Even if I do not have a suitable non-JSTOR group, I still have variation over time and across journals on availability through JSTOR. I have 1,700 matching institutions (out of 3,000+ I had to attempt to match from JSTOR), and 30 years of data, I am not worried about a lack of power problem.

I will check my work in the morning. And backup!

4/5

Work Progress

2008-05-27T18:50:00.002+02:00

Tedious matching of names from one file to another. Has to be done "by hand." About half done with this new task. 2/5

Travel Plans - Wien, Milano, Zürich

2008-05-27T09:00:00.005+02:00

Next week, I am to go to a conference on "Endogenous Growth" in Milano on 5-6 June. On, 2-3 June, my hosts at the ZEW will be "evaluated," meaning that I could easily find myself "in the way." So, this was a good time to tack on some site seeing. I spent a couple of hours yesterday making travel plans. I intend to get maximum use out of my Eurail pass. So, on Sunday, I travel to Wien (Vienna) for three days before heading back to Milano on 4 June for the conference. The hotel in Wien, in particular, looks quite charming and was a steal. Since I will have effectively gone around the Alps to get to Milano, on the way "home" to Mannheim I will spend 7 June in Zürich.

This is roughly what my route looks like.

I am open to any suggestions about what I should see in these locales.

Work Progress

2008-05-27T08:56:00.002+02:00

For Monday, I was able to get the JSTOR data into a format that, for each institution (usually a university) and each journal, I have the date that the institution obtained online access to the journal. Unfortunately, I now have to find a common institution name between the JSTOR data and the journal data for about 3600 institutions. 3/5

Boat Ride along the Nekar

2008-05-24T17:38:00.008+02:00

The IBZ, the organization that runs the guest house I am staying, organized a boat trip up the Nekar River from Heildelburg. About ten of us went along and it was great fun meeting people from Australia, China, Brazil, Iceland, Romania, Germany, and the US. This was a large boat with 100 or more passengers that had a upstairs and downstairs and a restaurant where I got lunch and ein Pils.

Both Mannheim and Heidelburg are on the Nekar, Mannheim where it meets the Rhine and Heidelburg where the terrain changes from flat farmland to hilly woods. Mannheim is more industrial and Heidelburg is quite lovely, smaller and more touristy. They are about 30 minutes apart by train. We took the train upriver to Heidelburg and then the boat a little ways further up river.

View Larger Map
This is the typical view from the boat.We went through two locks.
This is an ancient castle (schloss) along the way. The older one just "next door"is from the 12th century.There was some sort of rowing regata going on just down stream from where we embarked.
This is the magnificent Heidelburg Schloss. I will return and take pictures from within.

All of us in the group will exchange photos. Others took pictures of the members of the group. When I get these, I will post their pictures.

Work Progress

2008-05-23T18:40:00.002+02:00

Spent all day cleaning institution names. Got the nonUS done and now am turning to the US institutions. Man, there are a lot of places where people do economic research.

I have not yet found a way to collaborate with the folks here at the ZEW. I want to earn this visiting position by giving as good as I get. At lunch with Marianne, I discovered that many of the folks here are using a survey of firms they conduct here. When I grilled here about the content of this dataset, she said that everyone know a bit or piece but not all. The data sound great, so they are going to try to find a way for me to see what is in it so I might help with research questions and identification strategies.

3/5

Work Progress

2008-05-22T19:49:00.001+02:00

0 out of 5.

A Walk About - part Zwei

2008-05-22T19:26:00.018+02:00

The Luisenpark is really quite lovely. It rivals more well-known gardens I have seen in other cities. There were lots of young families and older couples - oh so sweet.Here is a boat ride around the large lake inside the park.
Lots of families.
More families.
Outside of the Chinese garden, there is a nice waterfall that you can walk behind. The back side of water.
The Chinese pagoda.
Serves as a tea room.
Say cheese.
Just like my backyard - right.
A restaurant overlooking the lake.
I got tired and so rested at a performance of Swan Lake. Again, very sweet.
This is to regular chess what the wii is to video games. Actually, these were plastic and looked quite light. But it was fun to see kids playing chess by walking around with peices.
Another fountain.

A Walk About - part Ein

2008-05-22T19:10:00.007+02:00

Today is a holiday (I do not know what for) and few come to work. So, I went on a walk about. At lunch yesterday, Jörg mentioned the Luisenpark was quite nice. It was a little further than I expected but, I need the exercise.

View Larger Map
On the way, I went by the Wasserturm (Water Tower) that is a trademark of the city.

I love the fountains.
The staircase of water coming down from the tower and the covered walkway beyond.
Fountains toward a boulevard.

My Office

2008-05-22T19:08:00.003+02:00

Such that it is.

Work Progress

2008-05-21T18:03:00.002+02:00

I spent almost all of today checking for spelling errors. Almost 10,000 names show up as the institution from which an economist published an article. And that is just outside of the US. Many are simple misspellings or multiple spellings from transliterations. Two-thirds of these institutions show up just once and are not likely to make it into my analysis. However, if it is a misspelling of a big university, I should try to catch it. I have gone through the file once now and fixed as many as I could find. Will try again tomorrow. Today was a 2 out of 5.

My Apartment

2008-05-21T08:57:00.010+02:00

The apartment I am using is part of a guest house run by the University of Mannheim. It is about as I expected - nice enough but not overly luxurious. It is less than five minutes walk to either the university or the ZEW.

Here is the kitchen. It is small but bigger than I need. The lower art of the cabinet on the right is a refrigerator.

Just across from the cook area is a small table and two chairs.

The first thing you see when you enter the apartment is the desk. The kitchen is to the left and the living room/bedroom is to the right. If you look closely at the laptop in the photo, you can see that I am trying to find a wifi network. Alas, I have not been able to piggyback off of any of the wifi networks that my laptop finds. Like many people, I have to do my surfing at "work."
The living room has some nice storage units that will go unused.
Here is my bed, to the right of the storage unit photo. There is a cupboard for cloths on the left and a closet for hanging things on the right. The bed is comfortable enough. Or, perhaps I have just been so jet lagged. I slept 11 hours again last night.
The outside of the building is really rather "nondescript." I am on the third flight up, the second from the top floor pictured here.

Work Progress

2008-05-20T18:00:00.002+02:00

I am going to try to post at the end of each day on the progress I have made toward completing my projects. Today, I had lunch with four of my colleagues (Marianne Saam, Katrin Schleife, Bettina Müller, and Andrea Mühlenweg), I met with the president of ZEW, Wolfgang Franz, for 15 minutes, met briefly with Martin Peitz and discussed my current project with Jörg Ohnemus. Nice networking if I do say so myself.

As far as my current project goes, I am trying to see the impact of an online electronic database of past journal articles on future journal article production. I have data on all articles published in the last 30 years and when different institutions obtained access to JSTOR. There is a knotty problem is parsing the journal data into actual institution affiliation. The problem emerges because sometimes "Univ Texas" refers to Austin and sometimes to its satellite campuses. This occurs in other states too. Since I expect a bigger impact in non-flagship schools, I want to make sure I identify them correctly. A way to solve this is to use the zip code of the author to place him on a campus. Well, I hit upon a new algorithm to do this and it looks like it will be able to extract the zip code for 99.9% of US affiliations. On a five point scale of work productivity, today was a three.

Traveling to Mannheim

2008-05-20T08:23:00.004+02:00

Oh the Joy. I think that there was one empty seat on my flight to Frankfurt, and it was next to me. When you are 6' 3", this is like winning the jackpot. I might have even got two hours of sleep.

Going through passport control and customs was a breeze as it usually is in Frankfurt (economies of scale?). The train station at the airport is cool.

Flughafenbahnhof Frankfurt

The train station in Mannheim is more traditional.

Hauptbahnhof - Mannheim Central Station

I got to the ZEW at about 13:30, Irene introduced me to my new colleagues (so young) and I tried to maintain coherent conversations about their research. Better luck tomorrow. I got keys to my apartment, unpacked and crashed for 2-3 hours. After that, I had to force myself to stay awake until a decent hour by getting up and walking around the city. I will post pictures of the apartment tomorrow.

End of the IIOC

2008-05-18T19:23:00.002+02:00

The IIOC is over. My presentation went well even if the session was not well attended. I got a few good comments from the discussant, Mary Deily of Lehigh U. This alone makes he conference worth the time. In addition, I got ideas for two papers using data I have or have access to. I will have to contact my previous co-authors on these topics (more on these later). It was fun to catch up with old acquaintances and to meet new folks in my field.

Now on to Mannheim (by way of Chicago and Frankfurt).

Like a Kid in a Candy Store

2008-05-17T23:30:00.003+02:00

My session at the IIOC is tomorrow, so today I have been bouncing around from session to session listening to the presentations that interest me most. The problem is that there are about a dozen sessions going on simultaneously. I am not interested in all of them but I am usually interested in more than one at the same time. I usually will go a whole year without seeing a presentation on telecom or pharma, but today I saw a half dozen on each and missed a half dozen that I would like to have seen. Besides these, there have been papers on innovation and methods that I have had to miss.

The other problem is how to bounce around surreptitiously. We all do it but its kinda rude to walk out on a presentation, especially when there are only a dozen folks in the audience. I try to find a break between papers and sneak out. This does not always work because, often, I will have just met up with a some of the presenters, they have seen me in the room and they see that I am gone when it is their turn. So, I am a jerk but that is an occupational hazard.

Another characteristic of economists is that we are cheap. Tonight there will be an open bar (actually four bars). What, price is zero? I predict they run out of booze.

Time to Go - to DC

2008-05-16T14:57:00.003+02:00

I leave today. First though, I travel to Washington, DC to the International Industrial Organization Conference (IIOC) for a couple of nights. This is the major conference in my field with about 300-400 presentations of new research papers. I can always find interesting sessions to attend and I always come way with lots of good ideas. At this conference, I will present "Video Games, Crime, and Violence." I can only hope that I give more than I get.

Skype is Cool

2008-05-14T17:24:00.002+02:00

I am cheap. I do not want to pay for international phone calls while I am away but I do want to talk with my wife and kids, at least every once in a while. So, I downloaded Skype to my laptop and our desktop, bought two $10 headphone/microphone combinations, and tested it out at home. After we figured out how to turn off the microphone mute button, it worked like a champ. There is a bit of a conversation lag, but, it wasn't too bad for our purposes. How long will international long distance survive?

Rejected Again

2008-05-14T17:00:00.003+02:00

I am pretty bummed out. On the eve of my departure, I found out that my paper with Wairimu Mugo, “Is Foreign Aid Conditioned upon Institutional Reform?," was rejected for publication again. The paper came out of Mugo's masters thesis that she wrote under my supervision. I keep telling myself that a rejection is better than having no paper to be rejected. ("Tis better to have written and lost than not written at all.")

Writing this paper was something of an experiment I ran to see if there was a side benefit from supervising theses. Supervising a thesis can be a real time sink without much payoff for the supervising faculty member. The opportunity cost is working on your own research, which, we hope, will generate conference invites, publications, citations, raises, awards, and accolades all around. (Oh yeah, also new knowledge useful to the larger world - yadda yadda yadda.) However, if the end product of a thesis is publishable at a decent journal, it very well could be worth the effort. This may not be a good test because development is not my area and one of the referee comments is that we really messed up the literature review.

I am running a simultaneous experiment with another former student, Darshak Patel, that appears to be bearing more fruit. Two ingredients of this experiment are 1) it is in my field so am am better able to place the research and know what would be an important innovation, and 2) as a doctoral student at U. Kentucky, Darshak is still "in the profession" and has a long term interest in seeing his research published (incentive compatibility).

So, ideally, one should only hope for a publishable paper out of a supervised theses if:

The student is bright,
The topic is in your field, and
There is some longer term incentive compatibility mechanism.

Anything else?

Where I'll be

2008-05-13T05:11:00.003+02:00

So my apartment will be at M2 18, 68161 Innenstadt/Jungbusch, Mannheim, Germany which is located here. The old town was laid out as a grid with the castle (schloss) at the head and located just SW of the A1 and L1 labels on the map. The ZEW is located at L7 (located just south of the L7 label on the map). Note the distances. I think that my morning walk will be shorter than my current walk to my office from the parking lot. There may even be a Starbucks along the route.

My Hosts

2008-05-11T04:23:00.006+02:00

I will be "visiting" the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) group of the Center for European Economic Research, in German, Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung. Everyone calls this ZEW, pronounced zed-eh-veh and not zee-eee-double you.

The individuals I will be interacting with daily are pictured below. I have met many at previous conferences but some are new to me (mostly those on the left side of the picture below). I have been trading emails with the head, Irene Bertschek, second from the right below. Daniel Cerquera, on the far right, and I met last Summer at an ICT conference at ENST in Paris. Jörg Ohnemus, fifth from the right, and I have met a a few ICT conferences in Europe. At earlier ZEW conferences on ICT, Katrin Schleife and Margit Vanberg (6th and 4th from the right) helped me keep from getting lost and played gracious hostess on excursions to historic sites around Mannheim.

Preparing to Go

2008-05-11T04:17:00.003+02:00

So I am trying to tie up all of my loose ends before the big trip. Today, I ran around Fort Worth, Arlington and UTA collecting little gifts to give to my hosts at ZEW. Nothing big, just
UTA t-shirts and Texas related items (bluebonnets, armadillos, pecans).

Sharing the Love

2008-05-02T18:20:00.000+02:00

While I am away from home and visiting Mannheim, Germany during the Summer of 2008, I will try to keep in touch with family and friends through this blog. I hope to have nearly daily posts about my thoughts, experiences and photos from this trip. Stay tuned.