Lisa Cook's Credentials

Today Chris Rufo and Luke Rosiak published, “Trouble at the Fed: An Investigation into Federal Reserve governor Lisa D. Cook’s academic record raises questions”. It is mainly about her plagiarism, presenting a couple of examples.¹ One is quite unusual, being neither quite self-plagiarism nor quite regular plagiarism. She wrote an article with other economists, and they inserted a couple of paragraphs straight from an earlier paper by those others, but where she wasn’t a co-author on the earlier paper. If I get round to finishing my substack on plagiarism, I’ll discuss that.²

In the meantime, though, this paragraph caught my eye.

In 2022, investigative journalist Christopher Brunet pointed out that, despite billing herself as a macroeconomist, Cook had never published a peer-reviewed macroeconomics article and had misrepresented her publication history in her CV, claiming that she had published an article in the journal American Economic Review. In truth, the article was published in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, a less prestigious, non-peer-reviewed magazine.

I thought this was unfair, so I checked up on it. The unfair bit is that although the "Papers and Proceedings" is not refereed, it really still is The American Economic Review. It is from a special issue each year in May devoted to short versions of papers presented at the annual AEA meetings. Often these are highly important papers by top names, though often they are bad papers by unknowns. One of my favorites is a game theory paper by a couple of people who were in grad school at MIT at the same time I was, Drew Fudenberg and Jean Tirole: “The Fat-Cat Effect, the Puppy-Dog Ploy, and the Lean and Hungry Look,” The American Economic Review, May 1984, Vol. 74, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Ninety-Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May 1984), pp. 361-366. That paper has a funny title and although it may seem to have a lot of math, it’s very easy math by the standards of microeconomic theory and I wouldn’t be surprised if math snobbery would have kept it from being published in a top referreed journal.³ Or at least they would have been required to bulk it up with more equations than necessary.

Figure 2: The Puppy Dog paper has 1,603 cites

Thus, you have especially to look at the individual paper if it's in the May issue of the AER to know if it's any good. Lisa Cook’s isn't. It would not be publishable in a peer-reviewed journal of acceptable reputation (anything is publishable in *some* "peer-reviewed journal").

"Metals or Management? Explaining Africa's Recent Economic Growth," Laura N. Beny and Lisa D. Cook, The American Economic Review, Vol. 99, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the One Hundred Twenty-First Meeting of the American Economic Association (May 2009), pp. 268-274.

I do like the title, which has nice alliteration, but after that the paper goes downhill. Beny and Cook look at whether economic growth in African countries is helped more by Metals or Management. “Metals” is measured by the percentage of GDP that is ore exports. A problem is that that percentage is itself caused by GDP growth and so is unsuitable. “Management “ is measured by the premium the official foreign exchange rate over the black market exchange rate (and so is usually a negative number). That is a rather poor measure of good government and like “Metals” is caused by GDP growth. The authors run regressions of GDP growth on these variables and others. Regression 3(6) in Figure 3 below is the important one. Neither Metals nor Management comes out significant. Bizarrely, the authors report that 1995 is a significant year,, while not reporting the other 44 years in their sample.

I'd be ashamed to publish a paper like that.

Figure 3: The key regression 3(6) from Cook and Beny (2009)

It is also true that Lisa Cook shouldn't claim to be a macroeconomist. Here's a Tweet where she did claim that, the same Tweet with which I started this Substack.

Figure 4: Lisa Cook’s tweet about being a macroeconomist, the same as Figure 1, which Substack wouldn’t let me caption

She did take courses, I can believe, from the four professors she mentions, who have written very good papers in macroeconomics But she's known for her work on patents, not on inflation, growth, recessions, financial crises, etc., though she's taught graduate macroeconomics and her dissertation was on internal and external credit markets in Czarist Russia. The closest she’s come to macro is the bad AER paper I just discussed, which at least is about growth, and uses the macro variable of overvaluation of exchange rates as an explanatory variable.⁴

The "When I taught at Harvard" in her tweet is gratuitous. She was at Harvard as a visiting assistant professor from 1997-2002. The equations she gives are basic ones she would have used in teaching at the U. of Michigan or anywhere else, so why say Harvard? Also, it does mean something to have taught at Harvard, but it's much much easier to get a job as a "visiting professor" than as a real faculty member. I've been a visiting professor and taught there myself, but I always feel uncertain whether I ought to say I've held positions at Harvard Law, Harvard econ, Oxford, the U. of Chicago, and the U. of Tokyo, because none of those were tenure-track positions and I'm not nearly good enough to have a "real" job at any of them (except, maybe, Oxford).⁵

Nor is Lisa Cook’s co-author on the 2009 paper a macroeconomist. Laura Beny is a law professor with both a JD and an econ PhD who specializes in insider trading. The Africa connection is that she’s Dinka, with a father from South Sudan, though her own first language is English. She is most famous for filing a lawsuit against her employer, the University of Michigan, for discrimination against her on the basis of race, gender, and familial status, and for retaliating against her for filing complaints. The judge dismissed the discrimination allegations as being insufficient to even move the case forward, but allowed her to try to present evidence on retaliation for her baseless complaints, a fair finding. The judge’s 2023 opinion laying out the case shows Laura Beny to be “The Employee From Hell”. Read it and you’ll see how much trouble an entitled (Stanford, Harvard) affirmative action hire can cause a university. (for example, she was allowed to go on sudden medical leave for metnal stress not one but three times). You may see her side of the story in her lawsuit Complaint, or the Unviversity of Michigan in their Answer.

So, I don’t think much of Lisa Cook or her co-author. I wonder if it might be worth someone taking a look at her dissertation and at her curriculum vitae— at her job history, for example.

Footnotes

1. The Rufo-Rosiak piece is about her plagiarism, but the dismal quality of her research record has been known for years, first within the economics profession and then to the world when it came up after she was nominated for the Federal Reserve. Chris Brunet at Karlstack has been particularly vocal about it. His latest Substack is a good place to look for the past problems with Lisa Cook. One of the things I like best about Brunet— which he almost carries to a vice, since it interrupts his prose so much— is how he cuts and pastes his evidence into his essays. Even if he gets overenthusiastic in his condemnations, you can immediately tell because he shows all his facts, and he does have facts, rather than just bloviating like op-ed writers do.

2. Speaking of getting round to things, I said in my MFSA “Is Sex Binary?” debate Substack earlier today that I would publish three Substacks in these two days because I would finish Part II of my Trebuchet Math Substack in order to teach itto my 7th graders on Friday. Not so now. I realized I should spend Friday teaching them about the income tax and make filling out fantasy 1040’s their homework due Tax Day. More trebuchet math will come next week. Mr. Pinkney says he’s expecting a range of 200’ and hoping for 300, so neighbors, watch out.

3. The Puppy Dog paper would get published now, maybe, now that Tirole’s won the Nobel Prize and Fudenberg is a tenured professor at Harvard.

Coincidentally, the Provost at Michigan during part of the events of the Beny lawsuit I discuss later (2020-2022) was Susan Collins, another black female economist, but a very well-regarded one (who was in my class at MIT, though I never knew she was Scottish, and who is now President of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank with a very nice photo— see below.) Her curriculum vitae is also nicer. She lists a couple of Papers and Proceedings as AER’s, but take a look at “Lessons from Korean economic growth,” a much better paper.

Figure 5: Susan Collins, MIT Ph.D. 1984 (NOT Lisa Cook)

Two of the professors that Cook talks about having in classes have written interesting articles lamenting poor methodology in economics (though both are mainstream and top economists). See “Sins of Omission and the Practice of Economics” by George Akerlof (J. of Economic Literature, 2020). When I wrote this footnote, I’d forgotten that I’d read this, but now I see I actually wrote a blog post about it in 2020. See also, “The Trouble With Macroeconomics,” by Paul Romer (2016), which compares macro to string theory and talks a lot about the reverse-causality problem ('“identification”) that I talked about in reference to Cook’s paper.

4. Though, come to think of it, Beny and Cook don’t realize the macroeconomic implications of their use of the overvaluation of a country’s exchange rate. Their measure is the official rate’s size compared to the black market rate, which is a measure of overvaluation. But they are using it as a proxy for good government. That’s dubious, but there’s a macro meaning to the variable also, the direct meaning , “overvaluation”. Having an overvalued, fixed-rate, currency might well affect economic growth for macro reasons quite independent of whether it’s a proxy for misgovernment.

5. I used the same course materials teaching Harvard undergraduates about regulation as I did teaching Indiana University undergraduates, but I would never say “As I taught my students at Harvard . . .” in referring to my book. Some day I’ll Substack a funny story about Harvard vs. Indiana students, but I won’t digress so far today.