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

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 one is here.

Paper summary threads

Robert Dur @DurRobert

Training policymakers in econometrics: 🔹increases their responsiveness to causal evidence 🔹increases their desire to run RCTs Evidence from a field experiment with deputy ministers: users.nber.org/~dlchen/papers… by Sultan Mehmood @mrsultan713, Shaheen Naseer, and @Daniel_L_Chen

Lionel Page @page_eco

The striking difference in the distribution of effect sizes between scientific studies: - Without pre-registration (purple) - With pre-registration (green) 👉Results tend to be smaller when researchers pre-commit to hypotheses and analyses ht @dsquintana frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…

David Rothschild @DavMicRot

Way more people report watching FNC & MSNBC in past week than ever watch in a month, roughly as many report FNC most used station as ever watch in a month, but MSNBC more realistic reporting of most used 2/9

Christian Wolf @ChristianKWolf

Just posted an updated version of my working paper on interest rate cuts & stimulus checks. Three main points on how I think about these two as macro stabilization tools. scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/…

Ivan Werning @IvanWerning

New paper dropping today at Jackson Hole. How should monetary policy react when the economy undergoes a process of reallocation? Short thread and link to paper: kansascityfed.org/documents/8322… 1/n

David Weisstanner @DWeisstanner

Our regression analysis shows that the more working-class family ties individuals have, the stronger their support for redistribution. In fact, an upper-class individual with working-class partner & parents has similar preferences than an average working-class individual. 4/

Joe Henrich @JoHenrich

Great paper by @DumanBRad, showing what happened when India made a law in 2005 requiring equal female inheritance: more parallel cousin marriage and less labor force participation (fig below). @DrNathanNunn @JF_Schulz. Fascinating implications for Islam&Christianity. @HarvardHEB

More: welfare effects of labor income tax and married couples; graduating during a recession; county-level data on US elections; IO of innovation handbook chapter; German minimum wage; Clean Water Act and birthweight; product concentration and asset prices

Public goods

Christine Cai² @Christine_Cai27

🚨 I've created a list of public resources on applied metrics, coding, PhD-level class materials, tips on before/during/after grad school, with contributions from @TDeryugina, @ChloeEast2, @ColyElhai, @paulgp, @kritykrim, @AsjadNaqvi, @omzidar, et al.! ⤵️ christinecai.github.io/items/PublicGo…

christinecai.github.ioPublic GoodsPublic Goods

Dan Quintana @dsquintana

SCITLDR is a demo of a tool that can summarize your paper abstract into a sentence scitldr.apps.allenai.org This could be handy for writing paper titles and tweets, let’s take it for a spin…

More: inflation database; JM mental health guide

Interesting discussions

Arpit Gupta @arpitrage

We love to believe there are many specialists who enjoy digging through our complex prose. But consequence of turgid academic writing is we have moved away from text to communicate ideas to presentations. Now on Zoom; papers are rarely read except for final certification.

Arpit Gupta @arpitrage

Effectively, our conventions on how to use the most powerful and informationally dense medium have gotten so bad that we have largely moved away from it to a much less efficient medium we actually understand. Which we now struggle to use remotely!

^a counterpoint. And for the book industry, adjacent thread:

Chris Blattman @cblatts

How can we do this better as academics while maintaining the seriousness and carefulness of our work. Some people are skeptical this is possible. You have to oversimplify for a general audience too much. Everything I’ve learned says that’s not true.

Alex Imas @alexoimas

It would be great to get critique of behavioral economics from someone who knows some behavioral economics. Alas, today is not that day. This article is so off-mark that it’s worth clarifying the misses in short 🧵 1/n thebehavioralscientist.com/articles/the-d…

thebehavioralscientist.comThe death of behavioral economics - Jason Hreha<p>The official site of applied behavioral scientist Jason Hreha. He’s currently building the Walmart Behavioral Science division, which applies psychology to business, HR, and technology design problems. </p>

Chris Blattman @cblatts

A behavioral scientist declaring behavioral economics is dead and will not be a respected field in 10y. Some interesting points, but (as a non behavioral economist) it seems like a super narrow conception of the field

thebehavioralscientist.comThe death of behavioral economics - Jason Hreha<p>The official site of applied behavioral scientist Jason Hreha. He’s currently building the Walmart Behavioral Science division, which applies psychology to business, HR, and technology design problems. </p>

^more commentary: Tom Pepinsky, Oleg Urminsky

Scott Delhommer, PhD @s_delhommer

Is there a structural model/IO equivalent of Mostly Harmless Econometrics? I feel like I have no clue what's going on in structural models.

Will Diamond @wdiamond_econ

@s_delhommer This book should clearly be titled "deeply harmful econometrics" or "extremely dangerous econometrics" or the like.