PicoBlog

Today Chris Rufo and Luke Rosiak published, “Trouble at the Fed: An Investigation into Federal Reserve governor Lisa D. Cook’s academic record raises questions”. It is mainly about her plagiarism, presenting a couple of examples. One is quite unusual, being neither quite self-plagiarism nor quite regular plagiarism. She wrote an article with other economists, and they inserted a couple of paragraphs straight from an earlier paper by those others, but where she wasn’t a co-author on the earlier paper. If I get round to finishing my substack on plagiarism, I’ll discuss that.

In the meantime, though, this paragraph caught my eye.

In 2022, investigative journalist Christopher Brunet pointed out that, despite billing herself as a macroeconomist, Cook had never published a peer-reviewed macroeconomics article and had misrepresented her publication history in her CV, claiming that she had published an article in the journal American Economic Review. In truth, the article was published in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, a less prestigious, non-peer-reviewed magazine.

I thought this was unfair, so I checked up on it. The unfair bit is that although the "Papers and Proceedings" is not refereed, it really still is The American Economic Review. It is from a special issue each year in May devoted to short versions of papers presented at the annual AEA meetings. Often these are highly important papers by top names, though often they are bad papers by unknowns. One of my favorites is a game theory paper by a couple of people who were in grad school at MIT at the same time I was, Drew Fudenberg and Jean Tirole: “The Fat-Cat Effect, the Puppy-Dog Ploy, and the Lean and Hungry Look,” The American Economic Review, May 1984, Vol. 74, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Ninety-Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May 1984), pp. 361-366. That paper has a funny title and although it may seem to have a lot of math, it’s very easy math by the standards of microeconomic theory and I wouldn’t be surprised if math snobbery would have kept it from being published in a top referreed journal. Or at least they would have been required to bulk it up with more equations than necessary.

Thus, you have especially to look at the individual paper if it's in the May issue of the AER to know if it's any good. Lisa Cook’s isn't. It would not be publishable in a peer-reviewed journal of acceptable reputation (anything is publishable in *some* "peer-reviewed journal").

"Metals or Management? Explaining Africa's Recent Economic Growth," Laura N. Beny and Lisa D. Cook, The American Economic Review, Vol. 99, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the One Hundred Twenty-First Meeting of the American Economic Association (May 2009), pp. 268-274.

I do like the title, which has nice alliteration, but after that the paper goes downhill. Beny and Cook look at whether economic growth in African countries is helped more by Metals or Management. “Metals” is measured by the percentage of GDP that is ore exports. A problem is that that percentage is itself caused by GDP growth and so is unsuitable. “Management “ is measured by the premium the official foreign exchange rate over the black market exchange rate (and so is usually a negative number). That is a rather poor measure of good government and like “Metals” is caused by GDP growth. The authors run regressions of GDP growth on these variables and others. Regression 3(6) in Figure 3 below is the important one. Neither Metals nor Management comes out significant. Bizarrely, the authors report that 1995 is a significant year,, while not reporting the other 44 years in their sample.

I'd be ashamed to publish a paper like that.

It is also true that Lisa Cook shouldn't claim to be a macroeconomist. Here's a Tweet where she did claim that, the same Tweet with which I started this Substack.

She did take courses, I can believe, from the four professors she mentions, who have written very good papers in macroeconomics But she's known for her work on patents, not on inflation, growth, recessions, financial crises, etc., though she's taught graduate macroeconomics and her dissertation was on internal and external credit markets in Czarist Russia. The closest she’s come to macro is the bad AER paper I just discussed, which at least is about growth, and uses the macro variable of overvaluation of exchange rates as an explanatory variable.

The "When I taught at Harvard" in her tweet is gratuitous. She was at Harvard as a visiting assistant professor from 1997-2002. The equations she gives are basic ones she would have used in teaching at the U. of Michigan or anywhere else, so why say Harvard? Also, it does mean something to have taught at Harvard, but it's much much easier to get a job as a "visiting professor" than as a real faculty member. I've been a visiting professor and taught there myself, but I always feel uncertain whether I ought to say I've held positions at Harvard Law, Harvard econ, Oxford, the U. of Chicago, and the U. of Tokyo, because none of those were tenure-track positions and I'm not nearly good enough to have a "real" job at any of them (except, maybe, Oxford).

Nor is Lisa Cook’s co-author on the 2009 paper a macroeconomist. Laura Beny is a law professor with both a JD and an econ PhD who specializes in insider trading. The Africa connection is that she’s Dinka, with a father from South Sudan, though her own first language is English. She is most famous for filing a lawsuit against her employer, the University of Michigan, for discrimination against her on the basis of race, gender, and familial status, and for retaliating against her for filing complaints. The judge dismissed the discrimination allegations as being insufficient to even move the case forward, but allowed her to try to present evidence on retaliation for her baseless complaints, a fair finding. The judge’s 2023 opinion laying out the case shows Laura Beny to be “The Employee From Hell”. Read it and you’ll see how much trouble an entitled (Stanford, Harvard) affirmative action hire can cause a university. (for example, she was allowed to go on sudden medical leave for metnal stress not one but three times). You may see her side of the story in her lawsuit Complaint, or the Unviversity of Michigan in their Answer.

So, I don’t think much of Lisa Cook or her co-author. I wonder if it might be worth someone taking a look at her dissertation and at her curriculum vitae— at her job history, for example.

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