Rob "Indiana" Jensen

Through Chris Blattman I learn that Freakonomics has anointed my former colleague Rob Jensen the Indiana Jones of economics.  Rob has a really funny account of his adventures--together with co-author Nolan Miller--in the search for that elusive treasure, the Giffen Good:

About five years ago, I was using a large, publicly available data set of Chinese households to explore the link between income and health. My colleague Nolan Miller walked into my office, saw what I was doing and asked, half as a joke, if I’d looked for a Giffen good.

I looked at my data, and sure enough, there it was. Higher rice prices in southern provinces of China were associated with higher rice consumption. The same held in northern provinces with wheat (things like noodles). We giggled like idiots, and quickly wrote up the results in a short paper.

But then the ground began to rumble as a giant boulder rolled towards us: The Identification Problem.

Which then led Rob and Nolan to carry out a field experiment in China--one of the best of its kind in my view in that it uses theory explicitly to guide the experiment.  Read the rest of Rob's account for the full story.  Read also Chris Blattman's account of his adventures with Rob.

Unlike the real Indiana Jones, Rob is extremely good in the class room too.  He regularly embarrassed me and the rest of the MPAID faculty--except for Nolan who does equally well--by pulling the highest teaching evaluations imaginable.

UPDATE:  Nolan tells me that it was the "persistent nagging" of a first-year MPAID student that got him thinking about real examples of Giffen goods in the first place.  Rarely do you see the benefits of our students in such direct ways: from questions in the classroom to a research project that took several years to complete, to a major publication in AER, and to a paper that will be in every introductory economics textbook for decades...

Comments

[Ken Houghton]

"Unlike the real Indiana Jones, Rob is extremely good in the class room too."

Uh, no; the real one scored well in the classroom as well. See especially the classroom scene in the third film ("X never, ever marks the spot"), where the students are fascinated by Dr. Jones (including the girl who writes something like "I love you" on her eyelids: decent trick with 1940s makeup).

[Lam]

hmm. but rice is the staple food of southern chinese, and wheat is that of northern chinese...if they are labled as giffen goods, then wouldn't corn tortilla fall into the same category?

[Barkley Rosser]

Sorry I do not have a link or exact cite, but somebody has argued for tortillas, although without the sort of controlled experiment reported on here. Some other commodities have been suggested as well, also without being able to overcome the identification problem, including the original suggestion of wheat that Marshall claimed Giffen suggested, although apparently Giffen never actually made the claim. Giffen never said anything about Irish potatoes, all the principles textbooks to the contrary. That confusion was due to some sloppy wording in one of Samuelson's editions of his textbook, which got misinterpreted, picked up, and then spread widely.

[Nolan Miller]

The paper Barkley is looking for is David McKenzie's "Are Tortillas a Giffen Good in Mexico?" from Economics Bulletin, 2002. McKenzie did not find evidence of Giffen, although the available data are not ideal. (So better data might show Giffen.) He has some interesting quotes that suggest people may be thinking along Giffen lines, including “I have no choice but to buy more tortillas and less meat, chicken and vegetables”
María Teresa Muñoz as quoted in TheWashington Post (p A11, Jan 12, 1999). See http://economicsbulletin.vanderbilt.edu/2002/volume15/EB-01O10003A.pdf

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