Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Two Academic Openings at Cornell

    I have the pleasure of announcing two tenure-track positions at Cornell that are of special relevance to me, one in my home department (Government) and one covering my geographical area of interest (Southeast Asia). Please distribute widely.

    The first position is for a comparativist, with a specialization in formal methods.

    The Department of Government Invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Comparative Politics to begin July 1, 2013. Candidates will be expected to offer graduate courses in game theory and/or formal modeling. Topical and geographical areas of specialization are open. Recent or prospective PhDs should have substantial promise of excellence in research and teaching, and demonstrated research skills and training; they should submit a letter of application, curriculum vitae, samples of written work, and three letters of recommendation, as well as teaching evaluations if available. A PhD is required no later than July 1, 2013. Electronic application materials should be sent to: https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/1636. We will begin to review applications starting September 14, 2012, and will continue until the search is completed. Cornell is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer and educator, and we strongly encourage applications from women and minority candidates.

    The second is for a specialist in Southeast Asian literature, religion, or culture, from the Department of Asian Studies.

    The Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University announces a tenure-track assistant professor position for a scholar and teacher of Southeast Asian literature, religion, and/or culture. Scholars attentive to the intersections of Islam with literary and intellectual histories are especially encouraged to apply. Abilities to teach general education introductory classes as well as more advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars are necessary. Ph.D. in hand by July 1, 2013, and publishing record or strong potential for publishing are important. Submit by November 5, 2012, a letter of application, curriculum vitae, writing sample, statement of teaching experience, and three letters of recommendation electronically athttps://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/1824. Cornell University is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer and educator. For further information contact: asianstudiesjobs@cornell.edu.

  • A Note on Methodological Discussions in Published Articles

    This very clever (and important) paper by Peter Aronow and Allison Sovey Carnegie on recovering the Average Treatment Effect from the Local Average Treatment Effect makes an interesting observation:

    …in a review of 34 empirical articles that employ IV estimation from 2004-2009 in the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science, only two (6%) mention that the causal effect being estimated is the LATE.

    This is a specific instance of a general phenomenon which is common among methodological papers: the author(s) will note that in a review of the literature, some Very Small Number of articles will have mentioned some Very Important Thing. The author(s) make this point in order to make the case that this Very Important Thing is misunderstood or unappreciated by the discipline in general.

    This is speaking directly to people like me. I’m not one of the authors who employed IV in the sample to which Aronow and Carnegie are referring, but I could have been: on two separate occasions I have been told by reviewers to “remove the discussion of the local average treatment effect” from a manuscript under review. One reviewer did not seem to understand what the LATE is. The other wrote something along the lines of “everyone knows what the LATE is, so get on with it.”

    Despite the rhetorical power of the sort of claim of that Aronow and Carnegie are making, failure to discuss an important methodological point does not necessarily reflect the author’s failure to understand it. It could also reflect an obstreperous reviewer or editor—and these people are gatekeepers, so we have strong incentives to implement whatever they recommend. Or it could, in principle, reflect the belief that that important point is so broadly understood as not to require explicit elaboration—like, do we cite Zellner 1962 in every paper that uses seemingly unrelated regressions?

    It is probably true that in this specific example, Aronow and Carnegie are correct that most political scientists aren’t really thinking about what specific quantity the LATE represents, a claim I have made around here once or twice before. But, we ought to be careful about what a review of published studies can tell us about what their authors think, and by implication, what a discipline believes. Running manuscripts through the wringer of peer review very often produces articles that look very different from what their authors had originally intended.