Per Engzell

Published is another matter...

One potential upside as the cost of writing a paper goes to zero: null results might finally get written up

After 5 years I can finally share a full WP of our project conducting cognitive interviews of life satisfaction reporting.

Main findings:
1. LS scales are psychometrically valid, but...
2. Standard statistical assumptions made when analysing LS data are not credible.

osf.io/gv5e3/files/...

When you collect data online, are the results from humans or AI? In a project led by Booth PhD student Grace Zhang, we estimate the prevalence of AI agents on commonly used survey platforms:
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧵

Good shout out! (Btw half of the authors overlap and everyone is in the same department so I think George knows...)

Excited to share new work with Yaming Cao @zew.de and @kayaez.bsky.social @cu-cardiffbusiness.bsky.social published in Labour Economics! Students with gritty peers in high school are more likely to succeed in the labor market. Gritty peers are pivotal for #FirstGen students. doi.org/10.1016/j.la...

My department really needs to stop hiring philosophy professors, we can't even stop the ones we have from posting on BlueSky

It goes like this the merge, the fix
A set of dummies does the trick

Dragon Ball Z meme: It's over 9000!!!!

When people ask me what my article's word count is

I love it when people explain basic LLM/AI stuff to me, it just gives me the standpoint to be an even better ally to women

A person with a microphone saying “ because I think that something awaits me in the divine for resisting“

Them: why do you keep calling yourself a “statistician” instead of a “data scientist”

Me:

Nothing accelerates theoretical clarity like a dataset that refuses to cooperate

Eerie

I just realised that there are "gift links". So, if anyone is interested but does not have institutional access, please feel free to download the paper through this link: academic.oup.com/ser/article/...

I know I know. I missed World Book Day. But tell me, how do you dress up as The Critique of Pure Reason? (Critique of Judgement is more or less my everyday attire.)

Laoganma looking at you as if you mildly disappointed her

MFW I see authors resubmit their paper at a different journal without any edits after they have received extensive constructive feedback during peer review.

He has analysed chapter by chapter - sometimes line-by-line, word-by-word, or syllable-by-syllable - Marx's three volumes

The blurb says written by 'the world's leading Marxist economist.' Wouldn't that be... Marx?

This figure shows the percentage of respondents in 35 countries across the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and the Integrated Values Survey (IVS) who rate “hard work” as more important than structural factors for getting ahead in life. Dark blue diamonds (IVS) and dark green circles (ISSP) represent survey year averages. Light blue and light green lines plot the trend in meritocratic beliefs across the five-year cohorts, on the basis of locally weighted least squares regressions on the cohort-country means (light blue diamonds [IVS] and light green circles [ISSP]). IVS data show whether respondents rate hard work (1) or luck and connections (0) as the more important factor for achieving a better life. ISSP data show the share of respondents who rate hard work as more important than “knowing the right people” and “coming from a wealthy family” for getting ahead in life.

The figure shows annualized change scores (subtracting the earliest from the latest value and standardizing by the number of years/cohorts). This figure is only included in the supplementary material.

How has the public belief in meritocracy changed over time? We address this question in our new Data Viz (@sociusjournal.bsky.social) by examining trends in popular beliefs across cohorts and periods in 35 countries, based on two datasets.

🔗 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231261425841

J.M.W. Turner – “Going to School, for Rogers's 'Poems'” and the quantitative landscape of vocational training and education in Britain

New paper alert 🚨 🚨
Education and Skills during the First Industrial Revolution in England
Together with co-authors @sdepleijt.bsky.social and @patrickwallis.bsky.social, we set out to solve one of the most intriguing puzzles of the Industrial Revolution

I see the Discourse is once again surrounding the results of an agree-disagree survey question among a hard-to-reach group in a nonprobability sample

Assistant/Associate Professor in Sociology at University of Cambridge An opportunity for an academic position as a Assistant/Associate Professor in Sociology is available, as advertised on jobs.ac.uk. Apply now and explore other academic job openings.

Exciting news, join us in Cambridge as Caius & Homerton are hiring for yet another Assistant/Associate Prof in Sociology🎉

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQS875/a...

What happens if the explanatory and response variables are sorted independently before regression? Suppose we have data set $(X_i,Y_i)$ with $n$ points. We want to perform a linear regression, but first we sort the $X_i$ values and the $Y_i$ values independently of each other, forming data set $...

For those who haven't yet seen this classic: stats.stackexchange.com/q/185507/2126 (someone whose manager was insisting that they do this ...)

This is population data so taking percentiles shouldn’t be that hard

Honestly even more concerned that there’s a ~0 correlation throughout 80% of the distribution

Your guess is as good as mine

"That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

All major typewriters can be used to either commit academic fraud or facilitate junk science, a test of 13 models has found.

Wage returns to human capital resulting from an extra year of primary school: Evidence from Egypt In this paper, we examine the wage returns to an extra year of primary school using a policy reform in Egypt, which reduced compulsory primary schooli…

Policy reforms to *reduce* educational attainment were detrimental for disadvantaged boys, in Egypt. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Is College Really “the” Equalizer? New Evidence Addressing Unobserved Selection Article: Is College Really “the” Equalizer? New Evidence Addressing Unobserved Selection | Sociological Science | Posted March 3, 2026

New paper out in @sociologicalsci.bsky.social!

We revisit the college-as-equalizer debate with heckman-style selection models and find little evidence in favor of college being an equalizer!

@zhenghaowen.bsky.social @professorholm.bsky.social

#sociology

sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...