Best of #econtwitter - Week of April 4, 2021
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of Best of Econtwitter. Thanks to those sharing suggestions, over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
Paper summary threads
🧵on a great paper. Identifies thousands of cases simultaneous discovery (different scientists, same discovery) and looks at what’s associated with a decision to commercialize. Two important ones: interdisciplinarity and prior collaboration with an entrepreneurial scientist.
Matt Marx @marxmatt
Preprint
- 162 researchers (73 teams)
- data: six questions from the International Social Survey Programme
- hypothesis: whether immigration reduces public support for social policies
- results: massive variation, not predicted by researcher skills or beliefs
New working paper!!
“Misdemeanor Prosecution”
w @jenniferdoleac and @annalilharvey
nber.org/papers/w28600
^“*not* prosecuting non-violent misdemeanors dramatically *reduces* recidivism without increasing local crime rates”, thread
This just got published and is very good.
A new study that asks: How has extreme poverty changed in the last 2 centuries?
The authors estimate poverty in many ways.
Their main innovation is to rely on 'a cost of basic needs approach' based on Bob Allen’s recent work.
👇 thread
During my Lamfalussy fellowship at the @BIS_org, I wrote a paper for its annual conference on “The constraint on public debt when r < g but g < m”.
A short thread on economic policy implications from the paper. (Ungated at bit.ly/3m2BmOX)
1/14
Interesting story about a prison gang reducing violence by essentially creating a parallel set of rules and justice system
IPA @poverty_action
The final version of our paper is now out as an NBER WP! I updated my blog post about it here: jasonkerwin.com/nonparibus/202…
Short on time? Here’s a quick tweetstorm about what we did & what we found.
We started with a question: why would you ask your employer not to pay you yet?
1/N
NBER @nberpubs
In a nutshell...
Savings of low-income HH -> bank deposits -> bank loans -> small firms
Savings of high-income HH -> stock market -> big firms
Relatively more income in hands of high-income HH -> small firms have fewer resources & create fewer jobs relative to big firms
🎉Publication Alert🎉
Extremely proud and excited to announce that my master's thesis "Monetary Policy and Production Networks: an Empirical Investigation" is forthcoming in the Journal of Monetary Economics!
🔗bit.ly/3m1r1CG
🧵Thread on key findings
Our @nberpubs paper proposing a new method to design short survey modules:
Measure a latent construct using both qualitative interviews and many close-ended questions.
Select for the module the questions most correlated w/ the coded qual data.
bit.ly/Agency5Q 1/4
So thrilled to see “Estimating The Anomaly Base Rate” with Andreas Neuhierl and Michael Weber published at the JFE @J_Fin_Economics!
doi.org/10.1016/j.jfin…
Here is a quick thread on what we do… 1/n
The resulting “anomaly base rate” varies over time. Eg, a new finding published in 2002 was more likely to hold up out-of-sample than a similar result in 1992 or 2012. So you might have traded on a predictor with a marginal t-stat in 2002 but not ten years earlier or later. 6/n
Public goods
Paul Milgrom has recorded (voice+slides) this ~ 3-hour lecture on his perspective on auction theory. This is the best intro to auction theory lecture I've seen, with some modern stuff on Matroids and greedy algorithms. #EconTwitter
web.stanford.edu/~mohamwad/Econ…
The NBER YouTube channel just posted a series of truly fascinating interviews with econ legends! Here is with Anna Schwartz, November 19, 2001. She got inspired in 1931(!) to study econ by her high school econ teacher ! youtu.be/bX3DzpkTDDw via @YouTube
Interesting discussions
I realized that I need to more formally teach some of my project staff how to manage upwards. Today I told one that "You have to treat any busy manager like an ADHD toddler who needs clear and constant instructions and reminders. Especially professors."
^thread
I often tell prospective PhD students that success in many PhD programs isn't about being a bright and beautiful flower. It's about being like slime mold, able to persevere and thrive without attention, water, or light.
John Horton @johnjhorton
The State of Development Journals 2021: in my annual gathering of statistics on leading development economics journals I look at Quality, Acceptance Rates, Review Times and how much did the pandemic change journal submissions? blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluati… 1/4
A note to people writing awesome, detailed, empirical papers ... if you provide sufficient details for someone *writing a model* to replicate your natural experiment, that would be absolutely awesome, then we can directly replicate your work and hold our models accountable to it
^thread
^this went viral so here it is