Best of #econtwitter - Week of April 24, 2022 [3/3]
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 three of three.
Paper summary threads
(1) New Working Paper: the fundamental driver of growth in modern economies, Total Factor Productivity (TFP), is linear, not exponential.
This is a paper I did not expect to write...
@ThomasPHI2 Hi Thomas - note that I argued this precise thesis 7 months ago in my essay: guzey.com/economics/bloo… Am surprised that it is not mentioned in the Introduction as a prior work, since your paper appears to be following directly the argument I made there.
^COI notice: @alexeyguzey was one of the very first people to promote this newsletter. Matt Clancy also comments: thread. Tough, since $$e^x \approx 1+x$$ for small x
Matt, thanks for the shoutout!
In the paper that comes with the data we describe the construction and document how process intensity of patents has changed over the last century.
papers.ssrn.com/abstract=40699…
@ganglmair
@wkeithrobinson
M. Seeligson
Thread with the results 🧵👇
Matt Marx @marxmatt
This research design by Bai, Chen, Liu, Mu & Xu (2022) fascinated me. Among other things, they randomly purchased, rated and reviewed infrequent sellers on alibaba. 1 order causes 0.1-0.25 future orders; review effects are n.s. I can't remember seeing an exp design like this.
We recently completed a field experiment showing how fake reviews impact on consumer demand and welfare.
For every dollar spent, fake reviews reduce consumer welfare by $.12.
Paper: rmetcalfe.net/_files/ugd/fe9…
Matthew E. Kahn @mattkahn1966
So we turned this thread into a report chapter.
This figure shows:
3 ed programs with steeply diminishing effects as they scale (early-grade reading programs, home visits, & teacher coaching)
2 that seem much more consistent (longer hours & meals)
Justin Sandefur @JustinSandefur
We find that although tuition freezes/caps keep "sticker price" tuition low, they also cause 4-year institutions to offer lower financial aid than they would have in the absence of the freeze/cap. 4/n
More: Nash meets Samuelson; political economy of life insurance (US); burglaries and guns; university research motives; hysteresis
Interesting discussions
JPE-Micro also will include Registered Reports: authors can have their lab or field experiments reviewed and approved for publication before empirical results are known. Overall guidelines coming soon!
Statistics terminology is truly unhinged. Different names for the same terms across fields. The same names for different things across fields. Common language terms applied in highly specialized ways. Two similar terms used to mean entirely opposite concepts.
Real answer. Reviewers, stop trying to prove to editors how smart and knowledgeable you are by writing 4-8 page reports. There should be a hard cap at two pages for a report.
Fred Feinberg @grazzidad
@grazzidad Simple solution: AE/DE highlights a subset of reviews to focus on AND makes it clear that you should not address other referee concerns. This is an outcome of ambiguous feedback or summaries that end with "try to other comments as well."
A big and interesting cultural difference between macro/finance and some arguably comparable fields in economics like micro theory is that discussions play a MUCH larger role in the former. E.g., people put discussions on their websites.
I wonder which equilibrium is better.
^post your discussion slides!
