Best of #econtwitter - Week of April 17, 2022 [3/4]
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 four.
Paper summary threads
🚨 New Working Paper 🚨
"A Welfare Analysis of Medicaid and Crime" (joint w/ @MuratCMungan and Han Yu)
The punchline: the marginal value of public funds (MVPF) associated with providing Medicaid to inmates exiting prison ranges between 3.44 and 10.61.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Happy to see this awesome paper by @PereArque and D. Spulber forthcoming in JPE! Finally incorporates crazy-hard-to-find data on the markets for technology (eg patent licensing) into R&D spillover estimation
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.10…
Basically, the exact time you show up at the triage desk determines which ER team you see
And different teams test at different rates.
Because of this quirk, we find:
If high-risk patients show up on a high-testing shift, they *die 32% less* than on a low-testing shift.
New NBER causal estimates of the effect of foster care placement on crime: placement in foster care *reduces* chances of adult criminal offending, possibly by changing parents' behavior.
nber.org/papers/w29922
I wrote a new paper, on the land market in China! Here's the abstract and link, and a short thread on the paper
anthonyleezhang.github.io/pdfs/cls.pdf
Interesting new paper by Yuzuru Kumon arguing that Japan's low-wage early modern equilibrium was "paradoxically" the result of a relatively egalitarian land distribution, which provided a base of sufficiently "land rich" households to sustain population growth.
“Why China Never Wanted Shock Therapy and Thus Needed No Escaping from It?" @clz030857 and mine review of @IsabellaMWeber ' bestseller on “How China Escaped Shock Therapy”. The whole review muse.jhu.edu/article/848484 is here. Some key highlights below🧵1/n
Important new paper on the long-run impact of school desegregation using new and improved linked data.
Court-ordered desegregation improved Black outcomes for those young enough to be exposed, had no impact on whites.
@jasonmfletcher
nber.org/papers/w29926
"Reducing each country’s Gini index by 1% per year has a larger impact on global poverty than increasing each country’s annual growth 1 percentage point above forecasts."
@JustinSandefur I cannot work out whether this is a meaningful comparison, because both feature 1%. If we looked at data on growth rates or gini changes over, say, a decade, I wonder what the standard deviations look like.
@albrgr I bet it’s very different for this poverty bar ($1.90/day) vs higher ones. Doesn’t take a lot of existing wealth to cover that part of the tail.
Interesting discussions
It's the announcement day for econ's John Bates Clark medal, so also time to update my graphic of all the JBC medallists!
I forgot if I tagged @Undercoverhist on this last year, but I'll point it out again this year.
I had GPT-3 answer the kinds of questions I might ask undergraduate international relations students.
These answers are all 100% AI-generated.
Educators (like me) whose assessments rely mostly on student writing are going to have to adjust to a world where AI can do this.
