Best of #econtwitter - Week of April 10, 2022 [2/2]
www.bestofecontwitter.com
Best of #econtwitter - Week of April 10, 2022 [2/2]
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 two of two. Part one is here.
Paper summary threads
New randomized control trial on 3-2 hybrid #WFH vs 5-days in office
Finds hybrid WFH
1) Lowers quits by 35%
2) Raises employee satisfaction
3) Has no negative effect on performance or promotions
Results so good the firm allowed WFH in all divisions
See stanford.io/3je2FVS
In Uganda, dads spend less on girls' than boys' human capital, but moms don't. Our analysis has the statistical power to show this Father*Girl effect because of a new method. We also test for the reason: Seems to be dads' lower altruism toward girls. New paper w/ @RDizonRoss.
Did TV draw Americans into a consumerist and suburban lifestyle in the postwar era?
This paper says it did.
Counties with TV access during the 1948-52 FCC Freeze had higher retail sales growth (especially in cars), highway construction, and birthrates.
Our paper on the effect of local temperature shocks on health is online on Health Economics! Using mortality and hospital discharge data from Italian municipalities (2001-2015), we find large evidence of negative health effects of very hot and cold days.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/he…
Summary of research with the always amazing @JuliaAFonseca. In 2004, Brazil implemented a very ambitious financial inclusion policies to bank cities in banking deserts. This foster economic development (more firms, employment and mean wage), but also increased inequalities a🧵
VoxDev @vox_dev
tl;dr: What's a principled way to make a decision when you're receiving conflicting advice? Turns out there's a very crisp answer to this question (which we call QA pooling). (Spoiler: the answer depends on your loss function, and only on your loss function.)
I estimate the causal effect of sharing a defaulter’s bank on non-defaulting sov bond prices. Identification uses *within-country* variation in bond exposure to a defaulter’s bank. The graph below shows an example of this for South African bonds around an Uruguayan default (8/n)
Women in cohorts with no female peers are 11.7pp less likely to graduate within 6 yrs than their male counterparts.
But this gender gap closes as the share of women in the cohort increases! 4/n
^cf: “blueprint [to] improve graduate student mental health”
Now forthcoming at American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
"Mental Health Costs of Lockdowns: Evidence from Age-specific Curfews in Turkey"
with @ronuraltindag & @pinarandmore
In short: we show evidence that lockdown-induced decline in mobility worsened mental health
1/
We help fill this gap by quantifying the effects of binding stay-at-home orders for those aged 65 and older implemented in Turkey on individuals' mental health.
The Turkish government imposed a strict stay-at-home order for the high-risk population of those 65 and older.
5/
The curfew-induced reduction in mobility increased the probability of experiencing mental distress markedly, measured by somatic indicators that capture physical symptoms of anxiety and depression and nonsomatic indicators that represent subjective assessments of distress.
7/
More: lumpy investments and US recessions; inequality in mortality in India; stablecoins; capital flows and misallocation; payments for ecosystem services; “global savings glut”
Interesting discussions
A year ago, a non-academic friend listened to a talk I gave. I thought it went great. My friend disagreed.
She said that academics are experts at making interesting stuff boring—and that we should all take a speech class.
So I did. And here are 6 most useful things I learned.
It should be standard practice when reporting the results of a randomized trial of a medical treatment to report:
a) How big did we think the effects were based on the non-random evidence?
b) Is the trial powered to rule out effect sizes like those in a)?
Eric Topol @EricTopol
