My name is Bera, Jarque-Bera

Greg Mankiw recently wondered whether he is a typo. He shouldn't be complaining; the man in the picture, on the other hand, has every right to.

Bluematter. is proud to award Carlos M. Jarque the Distinguished Medal for Most Misspelled Economist of All Times. On Google Scholar, a search for Jacque-Bera (see note to editors at the bottom of this post) returns no less that 177 results, while a search for 'Jacque Bera normality' generates 581. Many of these papers are published in prestigious journals, and my brief inquiry revealed a handful of papers (e.g.) which include tables that give the value of the Jarque-Bera statistic while referring to the Jacque-Bera statistic in the main text. Analysis suggests that the Jarque Bera statistic is misspelled between 5% and 15% of the times in published papers. Further anecdotal evidence points to less than 20% of the people getting the true name of the JB statistic right in conversation and unpublished work. To (roughly) quote Indifference Merv: 'It makes it difficult to figure out whether there are in fact two distinct statistics, Jarque-Bera and Jacque-Bera. Jarque has been done a great injustice by the profession'.

Note to Editors: Carlos M. Jarque is an economist with a long and distinguished career in economics, politics and management. Amongst econometricians, he is best known for his contribution (with Anil K. Bera) to testing for normality of observations and regression residuals: the Jarque-Bera statistic (here is wikipedia, and here is the paper)

Postscript: Anil K. Bera does not fare much better. A search for Jarque-Berra returns 173 papers.

Kill the terrorists, punch the hippies

There's more where this came from.

Disclaimer: I'll let you know shall I ever start posting paid-for ads. Not the case this time.

Friday Special 21

Spectacular travel photography from the world's most exotic and breath-taking places.

A view on Antarctica.

Although this water drop field may likely prove nothing, it surely is mind-stimulating.

Female only language vanishes with the last inheritress leaving the scene.

Mercedes Benz concept car without steering wheel.

How to tackle the distortionary effect of taxation

Taxation generally has nasty side-effects, because when you tax something people tend to do/produce/buy less of it. These tax-induced changes in bahaviour not only lead to inefficiency, but they also cause the resulting tax yield to be lower compared to what it would have been with no change in behaviour. Modern governments tend to treat these tax-induced behavioural changes as fair-play, but the pioneers would apparently have none of it:

During the various reins of the Egyptian Pharaohs tax collectors were known as scribes. During one period the scribes imposed a tax on cooking oil. To insure that citizens were not avoiding the cooking oil tax scribes would audit households to insure that appropriate amounts of cooking oil were consumed and that citizens were not using leavings generated by other cooking processes as a substitute for the taxed oil.

From the not-very-reliable-looking Tax World website.

Most puzzling sentence I read today

I really have to look into this:

[The Health Utility Index (HUI)]: The index [...] provides a description of an individual's overall functional health based on eight attributes - vision, hearing, speech, mobility (ability to get around), dexterity of hands and fingers, memory and thinking, emotion, and pain and discomfort. The HUI maps the responses into a scale ranging from negative to 1 (where one means perfect health and negative means worse than death).

With the exception of pain, how can any of the other attributes be 'worse than death'?

The excerpt is from 'Health Status, Health Care and Inequality: Canada vs. the U.S' (access for NBER subscribers).

Find the star

Go on, I dare you. Anyone who can solve the second from the right on the top row, can you please let me know how you did it?

The welfare effect of Apple-Cinnamon Cheerios

Since it's invention in 1989, Apple-Cinnamon Cheerios have added about 0.002 percent to our welfare, meaning that if they had never been introduced, then we would need 0.002 percent extra income to feel just as well off.

For minivans that number is 0.029 percent, and for satellite TV it's 0.035 percent.

What about the personal computer? Since its introduction in 1977, the price of a PC, when advancements are factored in, has dropped 700 times, according to Jeremy Greenwood of the University of Pennsylvania and Karen A. Kopecky of the University of Western Ontario.

The two researchers say that our welfare has been improved by about 4 percent thanks to the PC revolution -- or about 2,000 times more than Cheerios. (pdf)

This is from Odd Numbers, Portfolio's economics blog starring Zubin Jelveh. One for your RSS reader or bookmarks folder.