Best of #econtwitter - Week of December 6, 2020
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Best of #econtwitter - Week of December 6, 2020
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.
Newsletters in recent weeks have been extra long: the quality of econtwitter seems to have gone up noticeably since the US election…
Paper summaries
Hello! Tamara Broderick, Ryan Giordano and I have a new working paper out!! It's called "An Automatic Finite-Sample Robustness Metric: Can Dropping a Little Data Change Conclusions?" arxiv.org/abs/2011.14999
We propose a way to measure the dependence of research findings on the particular realisation of the sample. We find that several results from big papers in empirical micro can be overturned by dropping less than 1% of the data -- or even 1-10 points, even when samples are large.
^a big deal? See also and see also
And then they had the biggest effects I can ever remember seeing in an education RCT: the distributions between treatment and control are basically disjoint. Treatment was ~5 SDs better than control but that's ~meaningless here because of how badly control does.
^thread
🚨New working paper🚨 with Constantine Yannelis
We study “The Distributional Effects of Student Loan Forgiveness”. We find forgiveness to be a highly regressive policy. Full cancellation would distribute $192 bn to the top 20% of earners, and only $29 bn to the bottom 20%. 1/15
There has been a lot of interest in “redlining” in economics recently. Here is a thread on my new paper with @econtrout, @JessicaLavoice, and Price Fishback on the construction of the HOLC maps, which hasn’t received a lot of attention in economics.
Really important work that, like most of the empirical evidence, strikes against the simplistic conventional wisdom of “algorithms” driving the information quality problem versus a more complex supply and demand issue.
Homa @homahmrd
Elevated risk of credit payments 30+ delinquent isan early sign relative to those who never develop dementia (3/N)
Thank you for the kind thread! Beat me to summarizing the paper...
Dr Anton Howes @antonhowes
A new stylized fact about CEO pay:
There is a big decline in the cross-sectional variation in CEO pay levels over the last decade, both on aggregate and within industry.
Interesting paper about the likely causes and consequences: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… by Torsten Jochem et al.
Time for NBER Summer Institute live tweeting! Who will I antagonize this year? My guess based on program: people who want to keep their viable Kidneys even though they are dead.
^thread on multiple health papers; see Abaluck’s account for additional threads
Most of my research is in econometrics but I have been lucky to also work on an amazing interdisciplinary project in economic history. A resulting paper on trade in ancient Greece has just been published in @EJ_RES. Below, I explain its contribution.
doi.org/10.1093/ej/uea…
1/n
🚨Just published 🚨w. @RowenaGray6 & @nichiflu @ELSFinance. In the US, technology played a causal role in enabling workers to move away from agriculture and into manufacturing. Structural transformation is not just about rising incomes. t.author.email.elsevier.com/r/?id=ha43099f… 1/7
Do #cashtransfers make people happier?
@JoelMcGuire12 et al review 38 studies on wellbeing effects.
Findings?
- After 2 years, average cash effect is +0.10 standard deviations;
- More genrous provisions increase impact;
- Effect vanish after 7.5 years.
happierlivesinstitute.org/uploads/1/0/9/…
My paper "Welfare Analysis with Heterogeneous Risk Preferences" is in this issue of @JPolEcon!
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/71…
Those of you who know me as a macroeconomist are probably looking at this and going: ?
So here is the story... A tale of writing outside of one's field
There is a huge amount of cross-state variation in the cost of building Interstate highways. The 75th percentile state spent $8.8 million more per mile than the 25th percentile state. The mean spending per mile of US Interstate miles is $11.5 million (2016 dollars). 3/N
My paper with @WenxinDu @JSchreger in @JofFinance: Governments that use inflation to devalue local currency debt, even if only in most dire states of the world, pay for it with higher bond risk premia. That's why these countries borrow in hard currency.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jo…
Public goods
Big, huge, awesome @vox_dev news today!!!
We are launching a new content type: VoxDevLits
"Research is a dynamic venture & standard literature reviews are static & often not updated for a decade... we wanted to try to create dynamic literature reviews"
★★★ Alert: (small) public good ★★★
After years of explaining to individual students how to create a complete workflow / replication archive for each project, I've created a template. It's available on Github here:
github.com/NicDuquette/Re…
1/
Interesting discussions/threads
Transition to a better system of article publication, peer review, and dissemination underway? Interesting thread.
Noah Haber @NoahHaber
What is the most underrated Econ PhD program? E.g., it consistently produces well-trained graduates but is often overlooked for some reason? Like if you were trying to moneyball junior hiring, where would you look?
^followup: what’s the most underrated journal?
it’s great that economists do lots of field work and interviews now. But think of the absolute sloppiest, terrible causal inference paper you can remember, from someone who doesn’t even know that they don’t know what they’re doing.
That’s how economists do qualitative research.
Matt Darling 🌐💸🌇 @besttrousers
In replicating an analysis, it is possible to “p-hack” your way to overturning the original results. Any good papers discussing this?
Job market papers
This is a very interesting paper that overturns several pieces conventional wisdom due to the workings of a dynamic monopsony model: namely on-the-job search and wage posting.
Increasing wage flexibility for new workers could WORSEN unemployment fluctuations.
Marginal Revolution @MargRev
🚨How do business cycle fluctuations affect firm formation?🚨
My revised JMP argues: very large firms do not start in downturns. I combine US Census data with a model to document & study this compositional effect. Summary 🧵: 1/N
#EconTwitter
Paper: dropbox.com/s/imrozvyf3su6…
