Best of #econtwitter - Week of August 21, 2022
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of Best of Econtwitter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
Paper summaries
Working Paper Thread! “Preferences for Firearms and their Implications for Regulation”, joint with Sarah Moshary and Sara Drango.
We estimate consumer preferences for firearms and run counterfactual simulations predicting the effects of candidate polices.
How do minimum wage policies impact the rental housing market? Do landlords benefit from them?
I'm very excited to share our new WP with @gaborg and Diego Gentile Passaro where we try to answer these questions in the US.
Some key insights from the paper below
#EconTwitter
@agoodmanbacon @pedrohcgs So, what do we find?
- 10% increase in workplace MW -> 0.68% increase in rents
- 10% increase in residence MW -> 0.22% decline in rents
These elasticities are of similar magnitude to estimates of MW effects on consumption prices!
^Henry George laser eyes
You’ve just written down a model predicting that hi-X assets will have higher expected returns. If this prediction holds empirically, how can you be sure investors are actually pricing assets based on X?
This is the question I ask in ssrn.com/abstract=37053… A 🧵… 1/
🚨 Working Paper Alert! 🚨
I’ve basically been soft launching this for a while now, but I’m ready to share my first Big Kid working paper. Join me for a 🧵 on HBCUs, teachers, and Black student achievement! Comments and suggestions are much appreciated!
lavaredmonds.com/uploads/1/4/2/…
Happy to report that "Racial Segregation in Housing Markets and the Erosion of Black Wealth" with @econtrout @prottoyakbar and Li Hickley is now accepted at @restatjournal. We ask how segregated housing markets affected black wealth. 1/n
We know firms are getting bigger in general. But did you know they are everywhere growing their product portfolios?
This is the universe of US manufacturing and non-tradable service firms. Each year firms are getting more and more products...
We do so by building the first Distributional Wealth Accounts for Europe, including households’ assets, liabilities, investment flows, and the wealth distribution for most European countries from 1970-2020. We uncover two relevant facts.
🎺📜 Paper Accepted! “Infrastructure maintenance and rural economic activity: Evidence from India” (w/ @DuongTrungLe) is now accepted at @JPubEcon. We thank editor @sandipz and the amazing referees.
authors.elsevier.com/a/1fbtt_14odOL…
🧵 summarizing the paper 👇🏽 (1/8) #econtwitter
I am happy to announce that our paper “Austerity and Distributional Policy” - joint work with @alpmtt, @ZarehAsatryan & @BlesseSebastian - is forthcoming at the Journal of Monetary Economics! doi.org/10.1016/j.jmon…
My paper (tinyurl.com/msu9fb4x) with Ben Handel, Igal Hendel, and Mike Whinston got accepted today at @RevEconStudies. The title is "Optimal Long-term Health Insurance Contracts: Characterization, Computation, and Welfare Effects".
here, I discuss these three components: 1/n
More: misinformation in networks; urbanization and wages; pandemic UI; optimal monetary policy under bounded rationality; job ladders; canals; vaccines and fertility
Public goods
It is often helpful for job-market candidates to go look up faculty salaries when negotiating on the job market.
Here's my attempt to consolidate those websites if anyone wants to use it (or help me add to the list keeping w/ only .edu or .gov sites):
More: thread of stata tips
Interesting discussions
I have seen (& tweeted) several threads providing young scholars career advice. But I think there is also demand for advice for mid- to late-career advice. I consider myself mid-career, so this is based not experience, but conversations w peers & reflection.
1/11
^part two of the thread here
One thing I've learned from doing a lot of reviewing & seeing other peoples editor letters: editor almost never says "love this paper - should be an easy revision"; they hem & haw about what a good journal it is and what a hard revision it will be. It's cheap talk 1/n
^somewhat related: thread reminder of the inefficiency of the peer review mechanism
It is widely believed that good monetary policy must satisfy the “Taylor Principle” (i.e., that nominal interest rates should rise more than one-for-one with inflation). In important cases, I think this is a misconception. 1/
This #econjobmarket season, I wanted to share & get suggestions on an issue that often hurts women on the job market: Inappropriate Questions on the Hiring Side. I experienced it, didn't quite know how to address it & really want this to stop!🧵#econtwitter #AcademicTwitter (1/n)
Too many economists report estimates to multiple decimal places in their abstracts. The welfare gains from the policy are 8.34%, really?
Editors should threaten to replace excessively "precise" estimates by confidence intervals.
The boy-girl puzzle: An explainer.
Variants on the puzzle below come up often. Many will reason, incorrectly, the answer is 1/2 since there are two possibilities, so 50/50.
There is the common gotcha answer: 1/3!
And there is the correct answer, which is unfortunately: 1/2.
Pasquale Cirillo @DrCirillo