Best of #econtwitter - Week of April 24, 2022 [2/3]
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.
This is part two of three.
Paper summary threads
Autocracies overstate yearly GDP growth by as much as 35% when checked with more objective nighttime lights activity.
Democracies have a much better economic track record once GDP figures are adjusted for manipulation.
Luis R. Martinez @LuisRMartinezA
My work on Mismatch Cycles (with @ana_gfigueiredo and @isaacbaley) just got accepted @JPolEcon. A summary:
In the data we see a lot of mismatch btwn workers' skills and skill requirements posed by their jobs (eg @fatihguvenen, @BKuruscu, @econtanaka and @DavidWiczer).
1/N
Why do certain beliefs persist in the face of strong evidence that contradicts them?
How do some societal inequalities persist across generations?
This 🧵 explains a new paper I have with @trifen_hu studying these questions through the lens of #gender
nature.com/articles/s4156…
The Great Indian Poverty Debate, 2.0
A new World Bank paper says Indian poverty has fallen, but is higher than we thought. A rival study from India's IMF rep says India, like China, is approaching zero poverty.
I tried to parse the debate:
cgdev.org/blog/great-ind…
1/
Elegant new working paper -- "New Pricing Models, Same Old Phillips Curves?" -- by @a_auclert, Rigato, Rognlie, @ludwigstraub.
👉 The aggregate Phillips curve for a menu cost model looks like the New Keynesian Phillips curve, but with a higher slope.
web.stanford.edu/~aauclert/new_…
Reading through this now, and I think this is gonna be a great paper for linking how "reduced-form" and "structural" folks think about estimation. (Not surprising given the team)
Some brief translations to whet your appetite for reading this... (I am still in progress!) 1/
Peter Hull @instrumenthull
📢@XJaravel, @jannspiess and I just posted a new draft of "Revisiting Event Study Designs: Robust and Efficient Estimation"
As before:
- Challenges of diff-in-diff estimation by OLS
- Robust and efficient imputation estimator
NEW:
- Application to MPC!
arxiv.org/pdf/2108.12419…
Did gold/silver standard keep the value of money stable? Did it allow states to insulate monetary policy from politics? The short answer is no. Because politics cannot be kept out of monetary policy. The figure below summarizes the long-run evidence.
Monetary rewards for undertaking a desirable behavior partly offset people's costs to change their behavior; it's the remaining money that improves their economic well-being. My new short paper on this idea, applied to payments for conservation. seemajayachandran.com/pes_tradeoff.p…
Language models pop-up section
Context: https://beta.openai.com/playground/
Interesting discussions
For almost every signaling reason to do something, there is a countersignaling ("I'm so cool I don't have to worry about this”) account of the opposite behavior.
Examples 🧵
April Burrage @AprilBurrage
A favorite of mine: refraining from asking questions in class for fear of revealing ignorance. Familiar to many students.
A lovely guy, widely held to be the smartest in his MIT econ cohort, would ask "naive" questions freely. Huge public good.
