Best of #econtwitter - Week of April 3, 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. Part one is here; part three is here.
Paper summary threads
🚨NEW PREPRINT w/ @dbroockman. We conducted a real-world experiment to study the effects of partisan media. In Sept 2020, we paid people who normally watch Fox News to instead watch CNN. Median person was paid $15/hour for 7 hrs/week for 4 wks to watch CNN. Thread on results 1/
^request for the mirror image of this experiment; thread from coauthor here
How do states fight against organized crime?
We know that repressive methods are often ineffective and can generate more violence. Can policies targeting criminal revenues do better?
We study a policy targeting mafia misappropriation of public subsidies. Here is what we find: 🧵
Gianmarco Daniele @Giammacco
3/ We find that a group of firms starts self-selecting below the threshold of application of the law right after its enforcement. This behavior is driven by mafia-affected cities and sectors traditionally infiltrated by organized crime.
TLDR:
1) "Legal" firm size is complex and hard to verify
2) Essentially no penalties for misdeclaration in the tax data (data with bunching)
3) Social security data harder to manipulate (no bunching here)
4) Costs of regulation may be much smaller than previously estimated
2/4
Very excited to see this paper out in print! As always it was a pleasure to work with Mikkel. Brief summary thread ⬇️
We study the VA Disability Compensation program which provides persistent cash transfers to disabled veterans. The program has no wealth or income requirements and no explicit work restrictions: basic income! The program is massive (~2/3 SSDI expenditures) and growing (2/9)
🚨What factors determine the social integration of international migrants?
@michaelcbailey, @drew_m_johnston, Koenen, Kuchler, @DomRussel and I explore this question by studying the social networks of Syrian migrants in Germany
(🧵 follows, details at pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jstroebe/PDF/…)
District elections decrease the supply of new multifamily housing, but increase equity in where housing is built. This equity gain is problematic for long-run inequality as less new housing increases prices. My article w/ Asya Magazinnik conditionally accepted in @The_JOP. 1/13
^still begging someone to start a ‘best of polisci twitter’ newsletter
I am very happy to announce the public release of Egypt’s 1848 and 1868 individual-level population census samples. The digitization of these samples is a project that I’ve worked on since my PhD in 2009-2012 (1/n)
IPUMS International @ipumsi
So much gold in Sargent's "Learning from Lucas," "One morning in early 1973, Neil [Wallace] popped his head over the partition between our offices and said ‘Tom, our project is fatally flawed and over.’ Neil told me that he had read... (Lucas, 1972a)."
Public goods
The 2022 release of openassetpricing.com is live!! @TomZ_Econ and I provide 200 anomaly returns through the end of 2021, two new predictors (red in pic), and fixes for dozens of issues.
Openness + detailed docs + Github + annual updates = extremely high quality data. 💪🧵
Interesting discussions
I saw this by @toddrjones and it resonated. For many years I followed the academic economics “consensus”, ranking a PhD student’s success by how well they place academically. TLDR: I regret following that misguided judgment, and here’s why (most relevant for econ/soc-sci): 1/n
Todd Jones 🦊 @toddrjones
