Thanks for your paper, which I just read through quickly. While I haven’t read it carefully, I wanted to give you some quick feedback. I don’t think I have any serious issues with what you’ve done. While I could quibble on details, most of it seems reasonable enough. I do think that you lose a lot of efficiency by not pooling the data across years (which gives a lot of imprecise estimates which wander around), but that may be a matter of taste. I think you misunderstand me in the large though. I’ve never taken my estimate of 1.2 literally, and I don’t recommend you do either. The point of the original paper was just to say that the effect is large, which I believe it is (and most of your analysis bolsters that claim). I found the tripling to be too large for intuition when I first wrote the paper, and all you’re really doing is agreeing with me. A few other things. I’ve regenerated data from scratch twice more since the original paper was written; once for my work with van Wincoop, and again for my paper with Glick. So while I readily admit to minor data errors (e.g., the New Zealand/Netherlands issue), I’ve been trying to correct them. The stuff on language, I leave to others; I wasn’t aware that the CIA website could be so misleading; ditto with the WTO. More importantly, I’ve sort of given up on pure cross-sectional stuff, since I think that fixed-effects estimators are the way to go (that’s in my current work with Glick). Anyway, I enjoyed the paper, which was fun and well-written. Please continue to send me stuff —
