Empirical Work

I'm working on an empirical project to include in my dissertation. I started this project in June and thought it would be fairly straight forward, but combining data from different sources and performing tons of random analysis is really hard! I've rerun my data-generating code 8 billion times, because I decide I need another variable, or I didn't calculate something just right early on. Ugh!

But I'm working a lot harder that I do when I'm doing theory work (which entails a lot of laying on my bed thinking with my eyes closed) and it's actually a lot of fun to do all the coding. I'm using Stata because (1) Ed has Stata for windows and using the stanford unix servers remotely is a pain in the arse and (2) I have a massive aversion to SAS. Stata was very easy to learn (it helped that I could query Ed when I got stuck) and it's really easy to generate all kinds of stats on your data very quickly. Maybe I never really gave SAS a chance, but I'm going to stick with Stata for now.

I'm nearing the end of most of my projects and I'm teaching this fall, so I'm worried that I'll let myself get caught up in that and not start any new projects until after December. So I would love to start something coauthored to keep me in the research mode. I'm still really interested in the paper on returns and eps numbers that end in 9. It's random, but it seem really interesting. I'm at a loss about what to work on theory-wise right now. I'm so sick of my dissertation that I can hardly stand to think about transfer pricing or intangibles ever again!