The current issue of the Newsletter comes with...

The current issue of the Newsletter comes with a whole bunch of highly interesting job postings. So if you consider your current employment either boring or lacking, the job postings section is the place to go. In addition, this issue also contains information on a series of PhD-scholarships in Heterodox Economics and related subjects. Please note, that if you are aiming to do a critical PhD in economics you can, aside from the regular postings on PhD-scholarships in the Newsletter, also consult the respective section in the Heterodox Economics Directory.

Furthermore, I wanted to point you a specific paper included in this Newsletter, namely the opening paper of the current issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology: it is written by Julie A. Nelson and deals with “confirmation bias and stereotyping” in the experimental economics literature. It specifically focuses on experiments related to gender-specific risk-attitudes and it is one of the very few papers, which I read in full directly when it was published, although it does not at all relate to my current research. The paper contains a smart critique applicable to many contributions in experimental economics and, hence, opens up a new venue for critical, methodological research on behavioral economics and its relation to mainstream economic theorizing.

In a similar vein, I am sympathetic to the research of Luigi Zingales on “regulatory capture” in economics. Although I think his framing is a little misleading what Zingales actually tries to do is to detect ideological bias in the top segment of the (empirical) mainstream economics literature, which is indeed a worthwhile task. Another example for such a critical methodological approach is given by the work done on publication bias in economics: Doucouliagos and Stanley, for instance, offer an interesting application of publication bias-argument on the minimum wage literature, but much more work in this direction is still to be done.

I am emphasizing these papers and approaches because I think the “Herndon-Ash-Pollin vs. Reinhart-Rogoff”-case (see here) has demonstrated that heterodox economics can indeed attract significant attention by providing specific and well-thought-through methodological critiques of mainstream economic research that are connected to broader political or social issues. At the same time there seem to be some promising and unexplored research avenues in this context, which are hopefully taken up in the near future!

All the Best,

Jakob