Adam Smith's Lost Legacy: 'Wage Gouging' Exposed!

Here's a pretty ironic piece: 'Wage Gouging' Exposed! (courtesy of Adam Smith's Lost Legacy).

Advice On Writing Research Papers

If you're not an academic, you might want to skip this one. If you are, read on - it's worth it.

John Cochrane (one of the biggest names in Finance) has some excellent tips for graduate students on how to write a paper. Here are some of the best tidbits:

• Write out the one central, novel contribution of your paper - in one paragraph
• Write in "triangular" style - the main result first, followed by additional details
• Be concrete
• Don't put a literature review in your introduction. And when you do your lit reviews, make them brief - give enough info so that the reader can frame your paper among the 2 or 3 closest papers and see how it fits in.
  
• In the results section, start with the main result
• Document what you did and how you did it enough that someone else can replicate i

Finally, "keep in mind what your reader knows and what he doesn't".

There's lots more. Click here for the entire thing.

HT: Newmark's Door.

Insider Selling By Homebuilders

I haven't posted anything about the housing bubble lately. Also, if either of the jobs I've recently interviewed for pan out, we'll be moving, so , I guess I'm due. .

Here's an interesting fact (from Dallas Morning News Columnist Danielle Dimartino:

In the last six months, homebuilders have sold, on average, $347 for every dollar they've spent purchasing their own stock. Compare that to all industries, where insiders have sold $31 in stock for every dollar they bought.

Mr. LoPresti said July was the key month for homebuilder shareholders to watch what insiders were doing with their own shares.

"In July alone, homebuilding insiders liquidated 4.8 million shares of stock, the largest number in history, raising $333 million," Mr. LoPresti said.

The last time homebuilder insiders were this aggressive was May 1991, when they sold off 3.1 million shares in one month. This was followed by a 27 percent decline in homebuilder stocks over the next four month

Click here for the whole piece.

HT: Calculated Risk for the link.

As I've mentioned before, insider sales are typically much less informative than insider purchases. However, the magnitude of the selling is pretty impressive.

Fun With Do-It-Yourself

We wanted to move our main computer (the one the router's attached to) to a different room.

Unfortunately, the room we chose didn't have a cable outlet. So, my next-door neighbor said, "No problem, UP - I can drill a hole and run a new one to that room."

This is a long-winded way of saying that we're having computer problems at home and can't get online from there, so blogging from home may be light for the next few days until we fix the problem.

Tomorrow, I'll be at the office, and will post from there (I dropped by the library to do this one).

Academic Job Market Advice (via Madisonian.net)

Mike Madison at Madisonian.net provides some on-target advice for new job candidates in the academic market. He's gearing it towards law school jobs, but most of it also applies to finance/econ jobs. Here are some of his best tips:

Tip #1-A — Be familiar with the scholarship of faculty members of the interviewing school who write in your field, especially if those faculty members are on the interview team. Know what buttons you’re pushing when you make certain arguments, because you may get push-back from the author of the responsive argument, who is sitting in the room with you.

...Tip #1-C — Do not get defensive if someone attacks your work or your ideas. Engage! These interviews are often tests of your ability to have a charged but thoughtful scholarly dialogue, not tests of who is right and who is wrong.

Tip #1-D — Anticipate the inevitable academic’s question: “So, what are you working on now?,” and know that it refers not only to the draft that you mentioned on your CV, but also to the piece that comes next, and why.

Tip #2-A — The softball interview can be deceptive. Social fit matters to a lot of law faculties just like it matters to law firms. Stay on your toes, and don’t undersell your scholarly interests even if you’re not asked about them directly.

Tip #3 — Despite the fact that this is a ruthlessly competitive environment, be courteous to absolutely everyone you meet. In the best of all worlds, you will get the law faculty appointment of your dreams, and you can put the meat market unpleasantness safely behind you. Still, your scholarly reputation across the profession will begin at the Marriott Wardman. You will encounter many of your interviewers and many of your fellow candidates in the future, as colleagues at other law schools. Give each of them every reason to respect you when they see you or hear about you again.

He's got lots of other good advice, too. You can read it here.

I'd definitely second #3. Never show "attitude" to anyone. Almost every academic subdiscipline is a pretty small pond - if you act like a jerk to one person, you never know who they know (and who the people they know know).

I view the inital foray into the job market like a "coming out party". You get introduced to a lot of people at a lot of schools, and you'll also meet a lot of your "competition". Some of the other candidates I met during my first foray into the market are now among my closest friends. In fact, one of them was responsible for getting me an interview at one of the schools I'm currently taklking about.

So, you never know, and it pays to play nice with the other kids in the sandbox.

This Week's Carnival of The Capitalists

This week's COTC is up at Part Time Pundit. Here are a couple of pieces I liked:

Michael Cale of Financial Methods is talking about inflation-protected Treasury Securities in I-Bonds Yield Higher Than Treasuries. These securities have a current yield north of 6.5%, which is higher than any other money-market instrument.

Abnormal Returns gives us Emerging markets hoopla. He discusses academic research showing that higher economic growth isn't necessarily a precursor to higher stock market returns.

James Hamilton of Econbrowser talks about Oil Company Profits. He notes a puzzling pattern - that much of the oil companies' investments are for replacement of existing equipment rather than for new exploration.

As always, look around. You might find something you like.

This Week's Carnival of Personal Finance

As usual, Monday is Carnival Day. This week's Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Blueprint For Financial Prosperity. Here are some of this week's notable ones:

FMF at Free Money Finance will be discussing a recent article in Kiplinger's on retirement savings. In the first installment, he presents Seven Ideas for Maximizing Retirement Savings, Part 1.

All of us carry baggage from our childhoods --some good, and some bad. Nina at Sitting Pretty talks about some of the important financial lessons she learned from her childhood in a post titled ‚“Catch of the Day”

You won't need this if everything goes smoothly, but I'm a firm believer in Murphy's Law. In case it holds, David Porter at Pacesetter Mortgage Blog presents How to handle a complaint with a Mortgage Lender or Mortgage Broker.

A lot of people sequentially transfer credit card balances to avoid interest charges. Cap of StopBuyingCrap (hey, that rhymes...) shares some of the things you should watch for if you are considering about 0% balance transfer offers.

Dan Melson at Searchlight Crusade presents Credit Reports and Credit Score Manipulations

JLP of All Things Financial has been tkaking a tax class. Here he discusses ways to get Uncle Sam to pay for your college education.

That's all for now. As usual, look around -- tastes differ, and there's a lot of other good things up at the Carnival.