Best of #econtwitter - Week of August 30, 2020
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of the Best of Econtwitter. Recommendations always welcome over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
New papers
(1/16) Q: How should we seek to improve child outcomes? More cash for low-income parents, or more direct investments in children's skills and health?
A: Best evidence suggests direct investments much more promising.
cc #EconTwitter
New paper finds Puerto Rican migration to Orlando prompted by Hurricane Maria led to a slight increase (+0.8%) in aggregate native employment & no impact on aggregate wages, though with some small sectoral variation: native construction wages -2.5%, native retail wages +2.1%
1/ Rather than apply a summary indicator of inequality, we visualize growth incidence curves from ’67-’15 (following @MartinRavallion, @BrankoMilan, others). We first divide this into pre- vs. post-fisc income to see how taxes/transfers shape income growth at each percentile.
🚨🚨🚨 New @nberpubs working paper out now! We use a ~cool~ new method to estimate school-level income based on census block group-level data. Surprisingly, we find that income-based achievement gaps narrowed substantially between 1990 and 2015.
NBER @nberpubs
^Key figure here
[1/n] Very happy to circulate a revised version of our paper on shift share design, with the brilliant @borusyak and @autoregress.
You can find it here: …1-4c99-bb2c-0fdc17ec7c2d.filesusr.com/ugd/bacd2d_d80…
So here is a summary of what is in here...
1/n
AEA Journals @AEAjournals
[1/6]📒🖍️🔍New working paper on improving tax compliance & enforcement for small firms. We study a tax amnesty-type program in Greece that exempts firms from audits in years in which they report profit margins above a target scholar.harvard.edu/files/stantche…
This tweet that I supplied @nberpubs is unintelligible. I will allow myself a thread to give it another try.
NBER @nberpubs
One of the nicest examples I've seen of a HANK model helping to guide policy: an analysis of the Fed's new average inflation targeting strategy by @FedResearch economists @laurafeiveson @julielhotchkiss and others federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/d…
In light of the Federal Reserve’s recent move towards Price Level Targeting PLT(-ish), a reminder of this paper where I show (among other things) this policy’s virtues in T(ractable)-HANK
Two such virtues: 1/n
I'm excited to finally post a draft of my paper
"Shale Shocked: Cash Windfalls and Household Debt Repayment."
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
We have presented it a bunch of times, but haven't posted a draft officially publicly until now.
1/
Other paper summaries
My paper “Macroeconomic Drivers of Bond and Equity Risks” with John Campbell and Luis Viceira in this month’s JPE. Why do Treasury bonds increase in value in bad times? Low inflation expectations or flight-to-safety?journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/70…
1/3
This paper is officially forthcoming at AEJ: Applied!
“The effects of DNA databases on the deterrence and detection of offenders,” joint work with @annesofieanker & @r_landersoe.
aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…
Here is a thread describing what we do and what we find:
My paper with @NippeLagerlof has been published @EEANews!
Q. Why do some of the richest places in the world (e.g., Europe) have many historical borders? And why are borders found in particular geographic environments?
Thread. (1/5)
JEEA @JEEA_News
Our paper Trade and Domestic Production Networks recently got accepted by the @RevEconStud. While you may have seen a previous version, the paper has changed a lot over the last three years, becoming more descriptive and more concise.
Such a fun paper & collaboration: doi.org/10.1214/19-AOS…
In an instrumental var setting, we show how to accurately predict who compliers are, & give tight bds on generalizable effects in identifiable subgroups.
Surprisingly, these properties are orthogonal to IV strength!
Public goods
@VC31415 In case it's useful to anyone, I wrote a Jupyter notebook in which I replicate some examples from Wooldridge's panel data book. I provide side-by-side code in Python (using the statsmodels and linearmodels packages), R, and Stata.
^😍😍😍. See also discussion here
Here is the full set of slides of my presentation at the virtual European Economic Association Congress eeavirtual.org #EEA2020 yesterday with some thoughts about #EconTwitter & how to make use of it
First: what is #EconTwitter & what are some of its characteristics?
So over the summer I’ve been working furiously to put together a slide deck that folks can use to their classes with covid examples, recent economic data and studies, and discussion questions.
Now, it's time to share it. You can download it all here: users.nber.org/~jwolfers/teac…
Fun
Here's a game I learned from @ben_golub : Rewrite the abstract of your JMP using only the 1000 most common words in the English language. Here's my attempt. Took lots of tries, since the 1000 words don't include "dominant" or "strategy". splasho.com/upgoer5/ #econtwitter
^A lot of great replies here!