Times.konradturski.com – Political and Economic Commentary by a Postgrad in London

This is an equation, courtesy of a certain Robert H. Topel, published in the American Economic Review. What is x, subscript i, superscript jm? What does theta stand for? What on earth is big F? Sadly, Robert H. Topel refrains from explaining any of that. The exception is dotted z superscript jm, which is defined, of course, as the cost-sharing weighted average of five aforementioned skill groups.

Dear economists: purposefully making your papers absolutely unintelligible to all but the uninitiated just to prove how handy you are with the Greek alphabet and how proficient you are with Word’s Equation Editor, is not acceptable. Please revise your work, this time properly defining all variables, subscripts, and randomly-placed dots. Thank you.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 9:04 am and is filed under economics, for the record. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.