More Papers on Heterogeneous Firms

Looks like i’m a little late to the party.

Modeling aggregation is the next big thing in International Trade — two years ago. Some of the new assistant professors who are doing the rounds of seminars with their job market papers are theoretical extensions of the heterogeneous firm productivity strain of the literature.

The first is by Jonathan Vogel, (graduated from Princeton, now in UCLA) which is a version of Meltiz and Ottaviano (2005, unpublished) wherein he found an equilibrium for a certain kind of horizontal differentiation model, a spatial competition model. He finds that, under certain conditions, this kind of competition results in a similar conclusion to other models, such as the size distribution of firms. The notion of horizontal differentiation is strange –  that physical distance is related to market power. How he can test this distance hypothesis in exporting firms is unknown. This sort of thing is easier to justify in smaller  environments, such as competiton between gasoline stations.

This wednesday, Kalina Manova (from Harvard, now in Stanford) will present her Credit Constraints and Heterogeneous Firms paper. She links financial development, credit constraints for exporters and firm productivity and exports. This paper seeks to link stylized facts of firm exporting [which i'll report on as time goes by] to financial development.

I’ll write more on this later, since this is my area of research (for) now.

Here, everyone complains

In a free society, someone will always get hit. On TV guide, physicists are complaining about the science and the potrayal of scientists on Big Bang Theory.

They shouldn’t complain. If your profession is important enough to mock, then your profession is important.

Daily Show on Cory Aquino

DJB has an entry about jon stewart (or more specifically, the correspondent Samantha Bee) labelling Cory Aquino a slut.

However, i think context matters — especially since this is a political satire show. i posted a comment on his blog, which i reproduce below:

i’ve the seen the skit, and the idea is that samantha bee’s character is trying to say that america shouldn’t have a female leader. part of her ‘argument’ is maligning other great women leaders.

since this is a parody, isn’t the obvious point to take away from this is: there is no reason to fear a woman president because there have been several great and effective women presidents in other countries….

Isn’t this how parody should work? you are saying something bad/good to prove the opposite.

consider the comedy of stephen colbert. he plays ‘conservative’ on TV, to the extreme. The point is to show the silliness of the conservative position.

I have another problem with Stewart, when he beat up on Chris Matthews in the book interview portion. If you watch the segment, you may agree w stewart’s position (i.e. that matthews espouses a ‘macheavellian’ self-help philosophy), but he still should have let him tell his story, and maybe make his position clearer. Stewart, the next night, realized this, and he said that he had been drinking from the cup of ’sanctimony’ during the matthews interview. He was right. He was a bully — which is ironic considering he was beat up during his famous ‘crossfire’ interview. The difference was that he was able to usher crossfire out of cable tv…

Colbert’s formula

I’m a fan of the Colbert Report and of Stephen Colbert. In an interview, he says something about his comedic formula:

Q:I am not sure I would let my parents watch your television program. I’m afraid my dad would actually think you were being serious.
A: I love when that happens. We actually just had a little bit of that problem when we were writing. Last night we were finishing up the chapter on race in America, and my character doesn’t see race. He’s evolved beyond that. We’re like, how do we deal with this? So we’re about seven pages in, and talking about affirmative action. And LBJ has this famous quote, the famous example that he gave about runners in a race, and one runner has been shackled for the first half of the race, and then they take his shackles off — is it fair to just continue the race? Or would you move the shackled runner forward?

And one of the writers came up with this wonderful metaphor, about like, ”Well, no! It’s unfair to have a shackled runner run against an unshackled runner. They should have separate — but equal! — races. You should have a totally different stadium, and different events, and different endorsement deals, and that way you wouldn’t even have to take the shackles off! You could keep them separate!” And I really loved the metaphor, but on the page, like, this really is an endorsement of segregation. And you could read it and go, Jesus, the wrong person could read this and think it’s real. So we took it out. It’s just not stupid enough. It just felt a little too much like what you might hear, still, on certain radio stations. And we were like, you know what? I don’t want that in the book. I don’t want to put that in my character’s mouth. So instead I endorse an all-shackle Olympics. Some people get shackled, some people get to wear sandwich boards. Some people have their pockets stuffed with sausages, and a pack of wild dogs are released.

I find this interesting, especially in the light of the recent “Desperate Housewives” controversy. Comedy is all about making fun of people — disparaging others– and Colbert is one of the most daring out there. But he has an intelligent sensibility about it, and realizes that some people out there may be dumb enough to believe he’s serious.

Writer’s Block

i’m having the worst writer’s block…  must write… argh!