Best of #econtwitter - Week of April 18, 2021
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Best of #econtwitter - Week of April 18, 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
Are "behavioral" phenomena — such as cognitive biases — just something that crops up in low-stakes settings?
This new paper adds to the evidence that often the answer is "no". Here "high incentives" amount to more than a participant's monthly income:
Crazy stat: aging into legal driving age increases *total mortality risk* for teenagers by 15% julianreif.com/research/reif.…
AEA Journals @AEAjournals
We link voter registration data to personnel records of nearly the ENTIRE federal government. We establish 3 facts: #1 while presidents use political appointments to align ideology, there are no political cycles in the career civil service – the bureaucracy works as designed.
#3 Misalignment creates significant costs. Looking at procurement officers across the bureaucracy, we find greater cost overrun for contracts processed under misalignment. We provide evidence suggestive of a negative "morale effect", whereby misaligned officers are less motivated
Short version: library capital investment increases library use, particularly for children.
Capital spending also leads to improvements in nearby students' reading test scores.
Left: log children's circulation. Right: Reading scores (std dev)
New paper 🧵:The US is the only OECD country w/out national paid family leave, and concern about employer costs is a central roadblock. In our new @nberpubs wp, we surveyed employers in NY & PA in the 2 yrs before & after NY’s PFL policy went into effect. We find NY employers 1/3
In light of the US calling for a pause on the J&J vax, I wanted to re-up our new paper about changing guidance and trust in government.
We find that emphasizing changes in the government’s position can reduce the influence of government announcements on people’s beliefs.
(1/n)
Journal of Public Economics @JPubEcon
summary:
Clinicians widely overestimated chance of disease especially after testing
Cardiac ischemia after + ECG—EBM 2-11%, median answer 70%
UTI after + urine cx—EBM 0-8.3%, answer 80%
Breast CA after + mammo—EBM 3-9%, answer 50%
Pneumonia after + CXR EBM 46-65%, answer 95%
Popular Science @PopSci
🤔DO ADS ACTUALLY WORK?🤔
🧵We tackle this question using a large collection of display ad field experiments in a working paper with @EconInformatics & @enub
"The Online Display Ad Effectiveness Funnel & Carryover: Lessons from 432 Field Experiments”
ssrn.com/abstract=27015… 1/8
I want to share a methodological approach that @AOUSS and I used in our (newly revised!) paper on cash bail. It’s a method of identifying racial disparities in policy implementation that I think might be useful to others. (Long thread) 1/
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Excited that our paper (with E. Saez), “A Wealth Tax on Corporations’ Stock”, is now out!
Idea: a tax of 0.2% on the market value of big companies
- Hard to avoid
- Firms can pay by issuing shares (if they lack liquidity)
- Raise $180 billion annually
^Sylvain Catherine comments: “an increment of 0.2% in cost of capital reduces market value by 14%”
New working paper with my co-author @hbwheel w/ first available evidence from tax records on Opportunity Zones:
- How responsive are investors?
- Which neighborhoods receive investment?
- New tract-level panels based on IRS microdata
>> thread
More: social discount rate; debt crisis theory, labor rationing, decline in US net foreign asset position
Interesting discussions
This @Noahpinion piece has generated a lot of discussion. An ongoing thread of interesting reactions from #EconTwitter https://t.co/ViSUyWpbWJ
Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion
Econ PhD advice thread: @carolyn_sms and I co-wrote our job market papers, so we often get asked about the pros and cons of co-authoring with grad school peers. Now that we both have survived the market, I wanted to tweet out a few reflections on our experience.
This thread itself is 37 more tweets on inflation than I did in three and a half years at CEA.
Times have changed.
Council of Economic Advisers @WhiteHouseCEA
#econtwitter: if you are the primary editor of an economics journal (not top but good), overseeing hundreds of submissions per year, what kind of support do you receive from your department? Teaching reductions? Graduate assistant? Anything?! (Asking for a friend)
So the NYer retweeted this old article today, and it's causing some consternation on #EconTwitter. I thought I would take the opportunity to discuss issues about testability and game theory. (Something I've thought about quite a bit.)
The New Yorker @NewYorker
We should do hackathons in economics. E.g. a bunch of researchers get together + analyze a dataset for a couple of days, and present and share the results. Maybe this could work for theory too?
Would be a nice break from the 100-page paper / 6-year publication lag equilibrium.
