Best of #econtwitter - Week of August 7, 2022 [1/3]

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.

This is part one of three.

Paper summaries

Matthew Jackson @JacksonmMatt

Which types of social capital best explain economic mobility? Using data from Facebook, we consider more than a dozen social capital measures and our answers appear in a pair of papers in @Nature: nature.com/articles/s4158… 1/5

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Johannes Stroebel @stroebel_econ

Key take-away: Economic connectedness is strongly associated with social mobility.

^very nice *correlations*:

Ethan BdM @ethanbdm

The paper considers threats to causal inference in some detail (e.g., see pp. 9-12 of paper 1). Nonetheless, I'm not super convinced on the causal interpretation side. 2/

^+“Awfully big claims to be based on a study whose research design is just controlling.”

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Mara Barschkett @marabarschkett

My paper with @PeterHaan8, @diw_jgeyer, and Anna Hammerschmid was published in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing (@EconAgeing). 🎉 sciencedirect.com/science/articl… How does raising the retirement age affect health? In short: Health deteriorates. 🏥

Leah Boustan @leah_boustan

I have a new paper out @PNASNews with Ran, @jurafsky, @dallascard and co-authors. We trace 200,000 Congressional speeches about immigration from 1870-present. Speeches are: 🔸More positive now than ever 🔸But more polarized by party pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Michael Clemens @m_clem

What is the evidence that visas divert migrants out of irregular migration? A new, groundbreaking study finds that sudden visa restrictions against displaced Venezuelans diverted them en masse into irregular channels. By @OmarHGallego (pdf pg. 237+)—> etheses.lse.ac.uk/4372/

^more related to immigration: “Expanding prenatal coverage to undocumented immigrants makes their children healthier”

John Protzko @JProtzko

About 3 weeks ago I thought: "I wonder if behavior on economic games has been getting more selfish over time. But doing that study would be A LOT of work." Thankfully, someone went through and found out 1956-2017, people have been getting less selfish apa.org/pubs/journals/…

^challenges with interpreting this

Anup Malani @anup_malani

@ProfWEpstein has a nice 2019 paper on long term health insurance contracts. They are an alternative to mandates or subsidies to solve adverse selection. A big problem w/ LT contract is compliance. I wonder if job lock is a solution... @JohnHCochrane

^@anup_malani also summarizes here the classic Einav-Finkelstein-Cullen JEP. Related: summary of empirical lit on causal impact of health insurance

Natalia Garbiras Díaz @NGarbirasDiaz

Very happy to see our paper w/@m_montenegro_z published @AEAjournals! Electoral irregularities are still common in many democracies. We designed an experiment to test if ICT-assisted citizen monitoring of elections could be effective in reducing them (1/n)

aeaweb.orgAll Eyes on Them: A Field Experiment on Citizen Oversight and Electoral Integrity(August 2022) - Can information and communication technologies help citizens monitor their elections? We analyze a large-scale field experiment designed to answer this question in Colombia. We leveraged Facebook advertisements sent to over 4 million potential voters to encourage citizen reporting of…

Public goods

Heidi L. Williams @heidilwilliams_

It was such a pleasure co-organizing the NBER Innovation Research Boot Camp for PhD students with @Afinetheorem and @bfjo. We had an amazing group of economists make time to teach & talk with this group. Here’s a thread on what we covered in 11 sessions (w/ links to slides)…

^obviously extremely good, also extremely good:

Caleb Watney @calebwatney

What are key, policy-relevant questions where we could use more academic research? I spoke recently to econ PhD students at the NBER Innovation Bootcamp about holes that I think are not well-answered by the existing literature. Here's my list of 11 in no particular order:🧵

Matt Blackwell @matt_blackwell

Interested in causal inference? I updated my course last year and have posted the course materials online. If you're teaching a causal inference course, please feel free to steal my lecture notes! mattblackwell.github.io/gov2003-f21-si…

Benjamin Vatter @benvatter

If you're on the econ job market this year, I coded this little thing to keep track of applications last year. I just updated the download links, and it seems there are already hundreds of postings across AEA/EJM/AJO!

github.comGitHub - benjaminvatterj/JobMarketTracker: A simple economics job market application trackerA simple economics job market application tracker. Contribute to benjaminvatterj/JobMarketTracker development by creating an account on GitHub.

Interesting discussions

Ethan BdM @ethanbdm

Hi folks. A few months back I gave a talk at Caltech. It was the best campus visit experience I've had in quite some time. And it has made me want to change campus visit norms a bit. So today at lunch @sgehlbach told me I should tweet about it, which I'm now doing. 1/

Michael Ewens @startupecon

I admit to have freaked out a bit after seeing @toniwhited retweet this. The OP's other replies were *very* helpful additions and totally reasonable: other bias could be at play, categorical vars are weird and we assume a lot with the standard ME attenuation bias formula.

Maarten van Smeden @MaartenvSmeden

Measurement 👏 error 👏 does 👏 not 👏 mean 👏 the 👏 effects 👏 are 👏 underestimated

Jon Steinsson @JonSteinsson

A few words about grad teaching. I am taking over teaching growth to the first-years at Berkeley this fall. Heavy lift given my (lack of) research expertise. 1/