A Talented Professor-to-be from Hong Kong

His name is K P Tsang, an assistant professor-to-be at Virginia Tech, a very good school. And yes, he actually attends the same graduate school where professor Steven N S Cheung once taught.

To be honest with you, I find his non-economic blog posts in Chinese a better read than his techical work. Well at least you do not have to go through all those tables, equations and appendix which contains pages of proofs when reading the former. Here is a sample of his non-economic writing in Chinese:

自小就愛寫作，愛幻想自己有寫作天份。從高談闊論到多愁善感，揮筆直書，洋洋灑灑，實在是自我滿足的最佳選擇。但愛寫作跟擅寫作是兩回事，就如五音不全的愛唱歌、陽萎的好女色一樣，一腔熱誠可換來一盤冷水，一分努力未必得到一分收穫。...

到了研究院，有空閒，讀了許多中外名著，才知道我也許有一點研究的才能，卻沒有一點寫作的天份。讀了喬治‧奧威爾的散文集，還敢寫散文嗎？讀了托爾斯泰的小說，還敢寫小說嗎？讀了以賽亞‧伯林的長文，還敢寫評論文章嗎？我讀佛利民、張五常，也不至如此沮喪。於是，《舊浪新潮》處於半倒閉的狀態，而我這個網誌，也只會告訴大家這本那本書好看，不敢寫如這一篇的抒情文字。

And if you insist, here is where you can find some of Byron's technical papers.

MIT's Jim Poterba, NBER's Incoming President

It is official. MIT's Jim Poterba will be NBER's next president replacing outgoing chief Martin Feldstein.

More from WSJ.

World Bank Chief Economist-to-be Justin Lin

Here is a story in mainland's financial magazine Caijing. Here is another story about Lin's employment up at WSJ.

Justin wrote his thesis under the supervision of the late Dale G Johnson at Chicago.

And here is a link to a video on Justin delivering his Marshall Lectures at Cambridge late last year.

Paul Krugman on Subprime

The fundamental cause of the sub-prime mess, according to Paul Krugman, is:

The real sin, both of the Fed and of the Bush administration, was the failure to exercise adult supervision over markets running wild.


His advice:

But let’s hope that when the dust settles a bit, Mr. Bernanke takes the lead in talking about what needs to be done to fix a financial system gone very, very wrong.

More here.

So the bottomline of Krugmanian approach to preventing economic crisis is:

Crisis ---> implies more regulation is need--->more regulation is implemented ----> if crisis still recurs ---> that means more and more regulations will be needed---> these additional regulations are implemented as well ---until the market is finally choked because of too many regulations, and there won't be any crisis. This then proves government regulation is effective in preventing crisis.

Professor Steven Cheung's Wikipedia Entry

Here it is.

Many thanks to the authors of this entry, Kempton, Angela Wang, Wallace and Aries.

I have also learned from Angela's blog that Cato has set up a Chinese venture, more here. And thanks Angela for the pointer. Even better, Angela is an economist by training!!!

Will the Real Coase Theorm Please Stand Up!

My view is that virtually all of the criticism of the Coase theorem
fails to appreciate the actual message that Coase intended with “Social
Cost” and is, therefore, essentially irrelevant. Tragically, because
we have focused on what he was not saying, we have not grasped what
he was saying. Consequently we have been neither sufficiently appreciative
nor sufficiently critical of his actual message.

Read the paper here.

Mind you, the author has not cited any of professor Steven Cheung's work in the piece. Will it affect the quality of his work, you decide by yourself!

Professor S.C. Tsiang Part II

My good friend Dennis, I believe it was him, back at college days sent me a picture of professor Tsiang circa 1992. Thanks, Dennis.

For an evaluation of professor Tsiang's contribution to monetary theory, this is the best place to start.

Leonid Hurwicz, LSE, and Kaldor

We all know that L Hurwicz just won the Nobel prize in economics. We also know that London School of Economics is an excellent school for learning economics. And finally, we know Nicholas
Kaldor was a famous economist.

I guess not everybody knows that Hurwicz was a student of Kaldor at LSE. It would be interesting to find out whether Hurwicz had studied under Hayek or not as they were both there around the same time in the 1930s.

More on Hurwicz here. Hat tip to David Warsh for the pointer.

海盜經濟學

林行止專欄今天提到學弟 Peter Leeson 有關海盜經濟學的研究，有興趣的讀者可上他的網站下載論文。

Nobel Laureate Is Leaving My Alma Mater

It is official. Vernon Smith will be leaving in 2008 for Chapman University. Here is a story in LA Times.

Beautiful Mind

My former professor Tyler Cowen, co-blogger up at Marginal Revolution, is profiled in New York magazine. Read more here. Actually the piece is a review of Cowen's latest book, "Discover Your Inner Economist."

Hal Varian Joins Google

Hal Varian at UC Berkeley is now the Chief Economist at Google, yes you hear it right, Google.

And yes, he is the author of one of the most popular microtext for graduate students. I used his graduate text as well as his undergraduate text when I was a graduate student.

Listen Up Ben

Chicago's Lester Telser reminded Fed chief Ben Bernanke what's the Fed's real job here.
Bottom line: Fed's real job is to respond to cirses, not monetary policy.

And yes, it is the same Telser who wrote the path-breaking piece "Why Should Manufacturers Want Fair Trade" back in 1960.

What is Capitalism?

Capitalism is talk, talk, and talk all the way down.

Read more here.

Secrets of University of Chicago Economic Department's Success

As Deirdre McCloskey, a former U. of C. professor, notes, " 'Don't you know that the greatness of the University of Chicago has always rested on the fact that the city of Chicago is so boring that the professors have nothing else to do but to work?' "

Read more here.

Does Poverty Cause Terrorism?

With the identities of the terrorists in the unsuccessful car bombings in England revealed as doctors, people start to have doubts about the conventional wisdom: Does Poverty Cause Terrorism.

A scholar said no, read more here.

UCLA Economic Historian Ken Sokoloff Passed Away

The economics profession lost another star on 21 May 2007. Ken Sokoloff, an economic historian at UCLA passed away on that day. Here's an obituary at NYT, here's David Warsh's take on what happens to UCLA economics department using Ken's death as the lead. Here is more background info on Ken.

Ken at least has one Chinese student, his name is Zhou Qiren (周其仁)who is now a professor of economics at Peking University. Ken served as his Ph.D. thesis adviser together with retired UCLA Chinese historian Philip Huang.

The First Female to Win the J B Clark Award

The American Economic Association announced Friday that Susan Athey, a 36-year-old professor at Harvard University with professional interests ranging from deepest economic theory to Canadian timber auctions, had won the prestigious John Bates Clark medal, awarded every two years to the nation's most promising economist under the age of 40. No woman had won the medal in its 60-year history.

Here is story in WSJ. Here is Susan's webpage at Harvard.

Here is an interesting blogpost on Susan's background, the most interesting bit is certainly the following on her work habits:

"To end, I am going to recount one story about Susan’s work habits. Last year, she was expecting her second child. I got a call which must have been late at night her time. It was Susan and she was trying to complete a few minor things on a project she and I were involved in on timber auctions in Victoria. After a few minutes I asked. “So you must be due soon, how is it going?” Well, apparently, it was going slowly. She was calling me from the delivery room! Most people are content to take that time off. Susan was clearing her to do list! Susan had time to spare and we chatted for a while and for the next hour emails continued to come in. The baby was born soon after."

Remembering John

I blogged about the tragic death of Stanford economist John McMillan here.

I was not his friend, and frankly I did not know him. However, we talked a couple of times over the phone when I was a graduate student in the US. That was in the early 1990s.

John was still at UC San Diego back then. Some of you might recall, in the early 1990s, John together with his colleague China expert Barry Naughton and two other authors had written several papers on Chinese SOE reform. One of which called Autonomy and Incentives in Chinese State Enterprise was eventually published in Quarterly Journal of Economics.

I was searching for a dissertation topic, and I thought about doing one on comparing productivity of SOE vs the non-state sector, which was a hot topic at the time. Called John up one day, I asked him if he would provide me with the data set used in several of his studies. He gave me some pointers on how to get hold of the data and told me to get help from one of his co-authors who was more familiar with the data.

I finally got hold of the data though I never used them. I felt forever indebted to him because of his generosity though. A big name professor dispensed his time generously on a unknown student from a far away university (my school is on the east coast, his the west).

That summer I came back to Hong Kong for a short visit. I picked up a book which has the translation of the essay written by John and his coauthors mentioned above. Got it and sent it to John after I returned to the US later that summer. And that was the last time I talked to him over the phone.

John affected me in another way. Another essay of his coauthored again with Barry Naughton served as an inspiration for my thesis. That essay is called How to Reform a Planned Economy: Lessons from China published in the 1992 issue of Oxford Review of Economic Policy. The influence of Hayek was notable in that piece. And that paper served as one of the papers which kick-started the ensuing debate regarding the different approaches transitional economies should adopt in a bid to reform their economies. That's the so called "Big Bang" versus "Evolutionary" approach to economic reform debate.

Loss of the Economics Profession

Stanford economics professor John McMillan just passed away after fighting with his cancer for the past 9 years. He was 56. Read the press release here.

John was the author of the extremely well written economics book for the layman entitled Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets.

Beyond books, John had also written a bunch of excellent papers on various topics. To me, his best paper is definitely this.

HT to Economic Principals for the pointer.