Best of #econtwitter - Week of August 2, 2020
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Best of Econtwitter. Recommendations always welcome over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
New papers
0/ I recently completed a series of threads about my AFA 2020 Presidential Address, “Social Transmission Bias in Economics and Finance.” It’s a call to arms for a new paradigm which I call “Social Economics and Finance.”
This summary assembles the threads in order.
What type of spending rules can better overcome legislative inefficiencies? @mazzimon77, @gp_mihalache and I study two types of spending rules, one that makes it mandatory the provision of public goods and another that makes it mandatory the provision of private goods. (1/n)
I find that households experience significant drops in income and rising needs in the months before and following a birth
Also, public programs like the EITC, TANF, and SNAP help, but don’t fill the gap.
🚨New WP🚨
The Evolution of US Retail Concentration w/ @socampdi
🔗 bls.gov/osmr/research-…
🔹Mathematical relationship between national and local HHI
🔹National and Local HHI ⬆️ but for diff reasons
🔹New Census data on retail sales by product ('72-'07)
🧵👇 (1/12)
🚨 new working paper 🚨
“Why Do Borrowers Default on Mortgages? A New Method For Causal Attribution” with @pascaljnoel
Two theories for why:
1) strategic
2) life events
For 30 years, economists have been trying to answer this question
nber.org/papers/w27585
\begin{thread}
(Short) thread on our new working paper on "The dynamic response of municipal budgets to revenue shocks" (with Jan Stuhler).
Link: bit.ly/2WQ3cm1
1/8
New paper of mine to share! Dust Bowl migrants were “negatively selected” and struggled economically, especially in California, but there were strikingly modest impacts of the Dust Bowl on average incomes in contrast to its enduring impacts on land.
New working paper w/ @YamilRVelez & @MayyaKomis on the political consequences of WWII Japanese internment -- copy of paper here scholar.harvard.edu/files/msen/fil…
The top 1% of physicians earn $3.9 million annually, more than 11x the average physician. 28% of physicians are in tax units that are in the top percentile of AGI, and another 24% are in the next percentile. Only about 13% are below the 90th percentile.
^one week later, this paper is still making a lot of medical doctors angry
Paper summaries
Very excited about our new paper out in @ScienceMagazine! "Disparities in PM2.5 air pollution in the United States” with @IanHHardman, @jayshimshack, & @john_voorheis! While there have been substantial reductions in PM2.5, meaningful disparities persist.
Very glad to see this paper forthcoming in the AER, six years since the first draft...(!) A short thread about the paper. 1/12
AEA Journals @AEAjournals
Our work on "demand-driven investment" is now published on ROKE.
A short summary:
The paper studies the effect of aggregate demand dynamics on the (private business) investment share of the economy.
(1/6)
elgaronline.com/view/journals/…
ungated version: scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewconten…
💡Short Econometrics Thread💡Today, I will talk very briefly about a few recent papers expanding the synthetic control method (SCM). I will talk about three working papers: Abadie and L'Hour (2019), Grossi, Lattarulo, Mariani, Mattei and Oner (2020) and Cao and Dowd (2019).
My paper, “A Promised Value Approach to Optimal Monetary Policy” (with T. Hills and T. Sunakawa), just got accepted for publication at the Oxford Business of Economics and Statistics. federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/f… 1/N
Announcements and public goods
🚨Announcement: Online PhD-Level Class in Household Finance
Open to all, please share widely.
Theresa Kuchler and I have organized 5 half-day sessions on topics in empirical household finance, including presentations by many on #econtwitter.
pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jstroebe/PDF/…
(1/7)
Martin Ellison @NuCampEconomics, Sang Seok Lee & I have uploaded a large (monthly & quarterly) interwar dataset to a website hosted by @cepr_org & dedicated to data collected under an @ERC_Research grant. I'll be uploading more trade data in months to come
^summary of the source paper here
@khayeswilson Owlstown may also be a possible option here, though not sure about hosting PDFs: owlstown.com
It's a website host specifically for academics. All done through a web editor.
Good discussion in the replies
The topic of the week was mental health. Rather than include all various threads in their full entirety, here are a few links: [1], [2], [3], [4]
Separately:
Now that this is finally officially out, I can give a very brief history of how this paper started -- in 2012.
paulgp.github.io/papers/bartik_…
^behind the curtain
OK, #EconTwitter. Here's my suggested programming camp syllabus. What's yours?
Module 1: General Programming Advice
Module 2: Theory of a Dataset
Module 3: Analysis
Module 4: Big Data and High Performance
Module descriptions tweeted below. (1/5)
Ashvin Gandhi @ashdgandhi