Best of #econtwitter - Week of April 11, 2021 [1/2]
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 one of two, this week — part two is here.
Paper summary threads
A thought-provoking couple of days discussing the 'Future of Globalization' at the @nberpubs ITI conference & a pleasure to present my work with Michael Webb on automation & trade.
Some key findings and insights from Day 1:
Stephen Redding @ReddingEcon
^thread concisely summarizing 7 new papers; followup thread on pandemic and climate change papers here
Effects of Green Revolution 🌱✊ ?
Using DiD to look at differential adoption of high-yielding variants 📈🌽 shows:
- 10% ↗️ in 📈🌽➡️ 15% ↗️ in GDP & ↘️ fertility & mortality
- had 🌱✊ arrived 10 yrs later ➡️ dev world gdp ↘️17% & pop ↗️ 233 mill.
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.108…
Now forthcoming at European Economic Review
"A Theory of Cultural Revivals"
w/ Murat Iyigun & @SerorAvner
In short: we present a theory of how culture can be molded by elites to prevent more efficient modes of production (that harm the elites) from becoming dominant
1/
I instinctively dislike school uniforms but accept the argument they may help stop bullying. But is there any evidence?
This clever study from Japan uses variation in the development of the apparel industry as a natural experiment.
Uniforms were good!
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Cable news polarizes local newspapers. when Fox viewership increases (due to channel position) in a county, local newspapers start adopting the language of Fox News. research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/hand…
Periodic reminder: On a planetary scale, there was NO deindustrialisation in the period 1970-2010. whether expressed in terms of % of manufacturing employment or output. There was only spatial reallocation. If you believe there's been some since 2010 it could just be noise.
We just posted a new working paper on LP vs. VAR estimation of macro impulse responses. Comments very welcome, summary below!
Everyone in the antitrust community should read Carl Shapiro's though-provoking piece: "Antitrust: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It".
Shapiro is a giant in the field of IO, but his diagnosis about the state of antitrust *law* does not ring true.
🧵
faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/fixing…
.@PrestonMui&I finished new "Reservation Raises"
Output: a nonparametric agg labor supply curve at the ext margin (emp)
Find: high local, but small upward elasticities
Inputs: 2 custom surveys of reservation wages for ALL labor force groups,US+German GSOEP
eml.berkeley.edu/~schoefer/scho…
Ester Faia @ShabalinaKate & I are motivated by
- Human capital is task-specific
- Wealth relative to potential earnings matter
- Reallocation shocks are often occupation-specific (automation, restaurants going from in-dining to delivery) and rarely shut entire sectors
1/3
Public goods
(3/n) We are releasing an open-source deep-learning powered library, Layout Parser, that provides a variety of tools for automatically processing document image data at scale.
Webpage: layout-parser.github.io
Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2103.15348
Github:
Interesting discussions
Our perceptions of some of the things we experience are deeply inaccurate. 🧵
Case 1: The vast majority of restaurants get few visits and go out of business quickly. This seems surprising because the typical restaurant you experience is busy and long-lived.
1/
This is counterfactual blindness - when you ignore what was otherwise expected to occur. When you compare relative to the pre-TCJA forecast, growth, consumption, and investment improved - just as CBO said it would.
Harry Stein @HarrySteinDC
Dramatic findings from a 45-year extrapolation are probably false regardless of any arithmetical error:
Neoliberal 🌐 @ne0liberal
Journal talk
The @restatjournal numbers for 2020 are now out. 1,666 submissions, up 25% over 2019, and 70% since 2016. For papers sent for review, median decision is 86 days, down from 129 in 2016, despite increased volume. 1/2
