📚 This is an archive of Aid Thoughts, a development economics blog that was active from 2009 to 2017. Posts and comments are preserved in their original form.

Academic sins

I've been reading up on journal articles on birth order in preparation for a DPhil paper. I ran across two (published!) papers that both committed deep and unforgivable sins. See if you can spot them.

First up, one paper (I'll omit titles and author names) began with citing a quote relevant to birth order:

The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.

Nancy Mitford (http://www.quotegarden.com/family.html)

In the other paper, the offense came during the econometric specification:

equation

where the parameter of interest was, of course, beta.