Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

74 Steven B. CaudillA bad regressionLet us look in detail at one case McCloskey considers to be a bad regressionincluded in a paper written in the area of sociology of economics. In 1992 in thejournal Economic Inquiry, Laband and Taylor (henceforth LT), in response to anearlier work by McCloskey (1986), use econometrics to determine whether poorlywritten papers are less valuable than well-written papers. As a measure of value, LTuse citations and adjusted citations. As explanatory variables they include thelength of the article and, as a measure of reputation, the number of citations to theauthor’s work. The independent variables of interest in these regression methodsare several indicators of bad writing suggested by McCloskey such as: (1) words persentence; (2) number of footnotes; (3) number of footnotes that interrupt sentences;(4) use of “bad words” such as “like” and “very”; (5) the use of “five-dollar” words;(6) the use of “is”; (7) the use of rhetorical questions; (8) the presence of table ofcontents paragraphs; and (9) excessive introduction and summarizing. Using thesemeasures and their regression models, LT find no difference in “value” or citationcount between poorly-written and well-written articles and conclude that writingquality does not matter.In the reply to Laband and Taylor, McCloskey criticizes every aspect ofthe paper: the motivation, the “theory,” the writing, and the econometrics. 8In McCloskey’s opinion, the Laband and Taylor model is a “bad” regression.McCloskey describes their empirical work as being “firmly in the lower tail ofmodern economics.” I attempt to fit McCloskey’s criticisms of the LT paper intomy four-point characterization of the PC approach to empirical research.McCloskey’s first criticism is not specific to the LT paper but is a criticism ofeconometrics as it is currently applied. McCloskey says, “What’s mainly wrong inthe use of econometrics in our profession is that it is not used for serious inquiry butfor reaffirming what everyone, especially the authors, already know.” McCloskeychides LT for using their econometrics to show that “Economists’ writing variesaccording to the intended audience” (McCloskey 1992: 693).McCloskey criticizes Laband and Taylor for using a very crude measure ofwriting quality. LT use the nine easy-to-quantify indicators given by McCloskey,individually, as proxies for writing quality. McCloskey argues that a single index ofwriting quality is needed. As McCloskey points out, the approach used by LTassumes that writers displaying excellence on one margin would exhibit excellenceon other margins as well. Writers with high scores on some measures of writingquality might have low scores in other areas. This possibility could mean that thesample contains writing of uniformly poor quality even though scores on individualmeasures vary. If the writing is of uniformly poor quality, the finding that all papersare cited about equally is not surprising. The problem, again, is that no singlemeasure of writing quality is used in the empirical research. In McCloskey’s viewthis is the end of the story. The LT instrument for measuring quality is no good, sothe project is useless.McCloskey notes that LT admit to having an omitted variables problem. Theconsequence of omitted variables is inconsistent estimators. McCloskey then statesthat little can be learned from the statistical failure of a misspecified model.