[PEN-L:4562] Re: Card & Krueger

[dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx (Doug Henwood)]

At 9:38 AM 3/31/95, Eugene Coyle wrote:

>In the Wall Street Journal I was touting yesterday was also an attack
>on Card & Kreuger.  On the editorial page, and it attacked the raw data
>that they used.

I interviewed Card on my radio show last Thursday, the day after the WSJ
piece appeared. I asked his response, and he made several points: 1) The
author provided him with the original paper the day before the article
appeared, so he hadn't had time to study it. But he said their own
reworking, which claimed to re-prove the classic +10% MW => -3% E relation,
was not statistically significant. Actually, if a +20% MW means a 5-6%
decline in employment, you've made 94-95% of the folks involved better off,
so how big a deal is this? 2) While they found errors, they didn't prove
that these were systematically biased in any way. The sampling technique
they used - some 420 restaurants - is bound to have errors, but one assumes
that these wash out in a big enough sample.

C&K haven't decided whether they'll submit a respone to the WSJ. But even
if they do, the WSJ has a habit of not printing responses from people
they've attacked by name.

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
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