Best of #econtwitter - Week of August 8, 2021
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.
Paper summary threads
An observation: over the last 15 years, led by @DrNathanNunn , cultural economists have systematically harvested hypotheses from pre-post-modernist anthropology (so, back when cultural anthropologists had hypotheses) and subjected them to rigorous testing. Important insights...
Overall, the trends are positive! More attention to Q's of research transparency over time. For example, more + more economists sharing data
^thread on research transparency trends. Though: “avg time to prepare replication materials was 31.5 hrs”
Pretty neat to see how satellite data can be used to measure the impacts of international aid programs.
In response to a GiveDirectly campaign that gave $1,000 to poor households in rural Keyna, we can see a corresponding increase in the building footprints and tin-roof area.
Over the last 3 years, I have been working on the Brazilian payroll tax reform. Today, I'd like to share some preliminary results on:
1. How does employment react to payroll tax cuts?
2. How do wages respond to payroll tax cuts?
3. What are the distributional effects?
How do interest groups influence elections? In this recently updated working paper, I study how union sponsorship affected the electoral performance of parliamentary candidates in Great Britain (1900-2019). dropbox.com/s/wi02b5cmb08q…
Thread👇
We pull together data from Glassdoor, new data on NDAs from , and exploit the passage of three laws in CA/IL/NJ that prohibit firms from using NDAs to conceal unlawful activity to bring the first causal evidence on the externalities induced by NDAs. 5/
Evan Starr @evanpstarr
Today's edition of "recent papers you should know" is Amanda Friedenberg's 2019 paper, "Bargaining Under Strategic Uncertainty: The Role of Second-Order Optimism". It's a wonderful example of a paper that delivers new insights from studying an old game.
<econometricsociety.org/publications/e…>
A thread on the study below, which purports to identify “The Most Discriminatory Federal Judges”. The two judges at the top of the study’s list are both (senior status) judges in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (EDPA), where I live. I have some concerns about the study.
1
Chad Topaz @chadtopaz
As economists, we usually focus on the benefits of agglomeration. But in ethnically divided societies, proximity between people can be a source of persistent conflict.
#EconTwitter 🧵 on forthcoming paper in the @EJ_RES with Hannes Mueller and @dominic_rohner
The Economic Journal @EJ_RES
Interesting paper using sibling gender IV on Norwegian register data for 1960s births to find that having 3 sibs instead of 2 increases male parents # of kids in next gen by .25 while reducing female parent # of kids by ~offsetting amount duo.uio.no/bitstream/hand…
More: homework copying; People’s Daily geographic bias; trade liberalization and firm productivity; extreme weather and economic activity; Acid Rain Program and health; performance measures and health policy; colonial money in Canada; YouTube content; income segregation and (physical) mobility patterns; integenerational mobility in India
Public goods
#EconTwitter, I've started an account to help new economists announce when they've joined twitter. Please spread the word and follow it if you want to know who's new around here!
(Instructions on how it works in the tweeted thread)
Welcome Economists! @WelcomeEcon
Hugely useful & important resource --> updated just in time for the new academic year!
Div.E.Q. (Amanda Bayer) @Div_E_Q
📢📢The @Stata native implementation of Sant'Anna and Zhao DRDID, and Callaway and Sant'Anna DiD procedures are now available for everybody to use it.📢📢
@friosavila is a Stata wizard and made it v. easy to install:
ssc install drdid, all replace
ssc install csdid, all replace
More: no one tweeted it but “Using PGFPLOTS to make economic graphs in LATEX”
Interesting discussions
It's amazing how different publishing norms are in economics versus other academic disciplines. Granting coauthorship is a *much* higher bar in our field, our papers are much longer and there is a heavy emphasis on quality (measured by journal rank, obvi, lol) over quantity.
^started another round of discourse on this: eg more, more, more, more, epi comparison. In particular
I taught every kind of hybrid this year (plus asynch):
Me in classroom with
- All students in the classroom
- ~80%/20% online
- ~50%/50%
Me online (at home) with
- ~80% students in classroom
- ~50%/50%
- All students online
One-size-fits-all advice (or tech)… doesn’t
🧵👇
⑆Luke Stein⑈ @lukestein
Academics and intellectuals who wrote books, especially books for a general audience: What did you learn through the process that surprised you?
Could be about the publishing industry, the writing process, or about yourself. Am collating my own thoughts for a long post soon...
An underrated point about externalities:
Suppose an action of mine benefits you. Even if I am perfectly altruistic in the sense that I value a $ of benefits to you on par with a $ of costs to me, that doesn't change the external benefit to you or the argument for a subsidy.
^especially good replies. Eg
