Politics and Peer Review in AMLO’s Mexico

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Alissandra Stoyan and Carla Martinez Machain. They are, respectively, an assistant and an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Kansas State University. On February 21st, Mexico’s Fondo de Cultura Económica (a not-for-profit publisher partially funded by the Mexican Government that is often referred to as “El Fondo”) disbanded the editorial team of the Economics peer-reviewed journal El Trimestre Económico.  The journal’s editorial team had been composed of researchers representing Mexico’s top research universities, including CIDE, ITAM, UNAM, and the Universidad Iberoamericana. As of writing, the journal’s editorial team page on Continue reading Politics and Peer Review in AMLO’s Mexico

Free Access to Early 20th century and 19th century articles via JSTOR

Estranged academics, individuals in the private sector, and the public at large can rejoice (a bit) as JSTOR has officially announced that it will make American articles and journals published before 1923 publicly available. Journals published prior to 1870 in other countries will also be made available. The official announcement states: I am writing to share exciting news:  today, we are making journal content on JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, representing approximately Continue reading Free Access to Early 20th century and 19th century articles via JSTOR

Interpreting Logged Independent Variables in OLS

Logging data is almost as dangerous as logging trees; if you don’t do either the right way, the consequences could be undesirable.  Below I will explain why we log data in OLS. Then I will discuss how to interpret the coefficient of a logged independent variable in an OLS model. The interpretation is not as straight forward as it normally is in a linear OLS model. If it is not done carefully, the results of the model may be difficult to understand. More following the jump….