The ARRA created 1.503 million jobs

From billy blog ... alternative economic thinking, 17 May 2011, commenting on the paper "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Public Sector Jobs Saved, Private Sector Jobs Forestalled." 

"The other point is that they depart from the convention and use 10 per cent significance levels for their analysis. Why do they do that? Perhaps to lay claim to more than their results can provide at the conventional level (which is a much more robust test on a model)? Further, why in earlier papers (not about ARRA) do the authors use conventional significance levels?

"The later results that the authors present (Tables 7 and 9) do not alter these conclusions.

"Further, if you then examine their elasticity results (Table 5) which they say is a “second way to report the jobs eff ect” you will find that most of their estimates are not statistically significant by conventional standards. That means the estimated coefficients are not different to zero – meaning no statistical effect is found.

"The point is that the authors are not entitled to make the conclusions they provide based on the results presented in this paper."