Best of #econtwitter - Week of August 29, 2021 [1/2]

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 one of two, this week. Part two is here.

Paper summary threads

Alice Evans @_alice_evans

Top jobs go to those who work long hours As long as men undertake less care work, they are more able to work long hours But regulation doesnt help! In countries with hours regulation, ambitious women can’t demonstrate their commitment, so get hit by statistical discrimination

Ethan Mollick @emollick

Famously, people who win moderate amounts in the lottery don't seem to be any happier than non-winners. This paper shows a reason is that players tend to spend a lot on tickets & research hasn't taken the total cost spent into account. When you do, it is clear winners are happier

Robert Dur @DurRobert

Misperceptions about other people are: 🔹widespread 🔹concentrated on one side of the truth 🔹much larger regarding out-groups than in-groups 🔹malleable to some extent through truthful information and experiences davidyyang.com/pdfs/mispercep… by Leonardo Bursztyn and @david_yang

Peter Ganong @p_ganong

Amazing new paper by @amirrkermani @francisawong on the racial gap in housing returns. Black and Hispanic households see their housing wealth grow less, contributing to the overall racial wealth gap substantially.

Robert Dur @DurRobert

What is the Media Impact of Research in Economics? 🔹About 10% of NBER working papers get covered in major news outlets 🔹Labor and macro get most attention 🔹Media coverage and academic citations are strongly positively correlated homepage.univie.ac.at/Papers.Econ/Re… by @lenny_ziegler

Anthony Lee Zhang @AnthonyLeeZhang

Quick thread on this paper with my colleague Constantine!

NBER @nberpubs

A model of lending markets with imperfect competition, adverse selection, and costly lender screening shows that when markets are competitive, interest rates can be higher, from Constantine Yannelis and @AnthonyLeeZhang https://t.co/5rFx2VeDCZ https://t.co/DdSJWXggJw

po gourinchas @pogourinchas

I presented a new paper (with @skalemliozcan, Veronika Penciakova and Nick Sander) at the Jackson Hole conference on Friday. Paper and slides here: kansascityfed.org/research/jacks…. 1/N

Javier Bianchi @JavierBianchi7

Has the Euro been a blessing or a curse? Paper with @JMondragonECON provides a theory of why the lack of monetary independence has made countries like Spain, Portugal, or Italy more vulnerable to a rollover crisis.

Jorge Pérez Pérez @jorpppp

We have a new paper on how to visualize, identify and estimate that panel event study you're working on! #EconTwitter Paper: nber.org/papers/w29170 Ungated: brown.edu/Research/Shapi… Stata Package: brown.edu/Research/Shapi… or "ssc install xtevent" A summary in four tweets 👇 🧵

NBER @nberpubs

Ways to make event-study plots more informative and an evaluation of different approaches to identification. Also refer to the accompanying Stata package, xtevent, from Simon Freyaldenhoven, Christian Hansen, @jorpppp, and Jesse M. Shapiro https://t.co/kQscRZ7XIz https://t.co/Q8lXjycOk3

Jonathan Robinson @jon_m_rob

A little late, but, as promised, this paper, by @AviFeller @EliBenMichael, & (the Twitterless) Erin Hartman deserves a 🧵 all of its own. Like Erin's other work in survey world, it's about embracing modern statistical tooling to replace existing practice arxiv.org/abs/2102.09052

Jonathan Robinson @jon_m_rob

I'm going to do a thread on the Erin Hartman, Eli Ben Michael & Avi Feller's DRP paper separately since I loved the paper so much. But I LOVED @b_m_stewart's summation of the core problems with survey weighting & causal inference how much cross-pollination there is across fields https://t.co/8ZrXWqQAy8

Interesting discussions

Steven Ruggles @HistDem

Despite the Census Bureau’s massive investment of resources and computing power, we found the database reconstruction technique does not perform much better than a random number generator combined with a simple assignment rule for race and ethnicity. /13

Dean Eckles @deaneckles

One frustrating thing about peer review: There's little chance for disagreeing reviewers to communicate with each other. Maybe previously positive R3 is convinced by R2's criticism. Or maybe they'd actively argue against it in favor of the paper being accepted. Who knows!

Felix Koenig @Feli_Koenig

Very cool that they launched a restud tour for European students! https://t.co/ige4o2BNjG

Lukasz Rachel @LukaszRachel

Humbled & honoured to be a part of the inaugural N America Restud Tour '21 (https://t.co/khuQ2GdEfz) along w terrific Nicolas Bonneton, Milena Djourelova & Elisa Macchi @alterelim. We’re presenting at @EEANews @econometricsoc today at 16:30 CEST: https://t.co/CfzeP3qumM. Tune in!

Ben Golub @ben_golub

Sometimes faculty complain about the stubborn Ph.D. student, who seems unaffected by advice. Talent and energy are risk factors for this disease, and, worse, is closely related to personality traits of many successful academics. A few random thoughts. 1/

G.C. Pieters, PhD @ProfPieters

Soo...the AP macro exam doesn't teach post-2008 contemporary monetary policy. Students *today* are learning that USA Monetary Policy is reserve reqs & OMO. Everyone needs to redirect their twitter energy away from debating principles courses and focus it on high school econ.

Jonathan Hersh @DogmaticPrior

While this is true, here are five reasons you might want to use ML versus OLS even if the performance is similar in test batches.

Alejandro Piad Morffis @AlejandroPiad

Here's an often overlooked piece of advice for all ML practitioners, but especially newcomers: 👉 Build a non-ML baseline first. You'll be surprised how often you cannot easily improve a basic solution by throwing some ML at it, and you'll learn something about the problem too.

André Spicer @andre_spicer

🧵There's been lot's of talk about 'The Chair' on Netflex. How does it square with research on the job of being a chair of an academic department? 1/n