Best of #econtwitter - Week of December 12, 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
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V. happy that paper 1️⃣ of a large-scale multi-arm RCT of 🏥 insurance in India 🇮🇳 w/ @anup_malani @cynthia_kinnan @AlessandraVoena et al. is out as WP!
👉🏻ifs.org.uk/publications/1… @TheIFS
✅ Uptake ⬆️
✅ Access ⬆️ use
✅ +ve spillovers
❌ Health ↔️
👇🏻
^forgive the rare paper commentary but: amazing experiment, would this have gotten more retweets if it had been in Oregon
Do taxes affect innovation? Over the course of the 20th century, personal & corporate income taxes have significantly shaped innovation in the US, as we show in a paper with @ufukakcigit, Tom Nicholas & @JohnRGrigsby in @QJEHarvard. scholar.harvard.edu/files/stantche… A short thread🧵[1/17]
MACRO results: personal & corporate income taxes have significant negative effects on the quantity of innovation and on the number of inventors residing in a state. Elasticities range from 0.8 to 1.8 for pers’l net-of-tax rates and 1.3 to 2.8 for corporate taxes. [9/17]
How much should we trust experts' predictions about the effects of behavioral interventions?
Megastudy by @katy_milkman et al finds:
🔹experts are about 10 times too optimistic about effect sizes
🔹no correlation between predicted and actual effects
nature.com/articles/s4158…
Your doctor sends you for a lab test.
Ever wondered if the outside temperature on the day of the test changes its result?
Neither did @devingpope or I… until we did this study!
Turns out, temperature distorts results
Thread—new paper in @MedCellPress
Cell Press @CellPressNews
Excited to share a new working paper taking a closer look at causal inference in school choice settings, where students are matched to schools via algorithms. The paper derives the identified causal estimands under heterogeneous treatment effects (1/n)
arxiv.org/abs/2112.03872
**New paper** Over the past 20 years (but not before!), Black and Hispanic college graduates have been steadily earning degrees in relatively lower-paying majors.
The main culprit? An increasingly-common public university policy.
A thread. #EconTwitter zacharybleemer.com/wp-content/upl…
"Our conclusion is that the main contribution of the Malaney-Weinstein work is that it provides a striking example of how to obscure simple concepts through an uneconomical use of gauge theory."
Timothy Nguyen @IAmTimNguyen
🚨 new working paper 🚨
I’m happy to share “The Electoral Consequences of Cellphone Coverage Expansion” with @GeShuning, @kkosec, @Apoorva__Lal, and Benjamin Laughlin. Link to preprint at osf.io/y94d5/
What is the biggest reason people are quitting their jobs right now?
WFH
For more see wfhresearch.com and follow #wfhresearch
More: DiD lit review; finance and cannabis industry; satellite data for poverty measurement; international enviro cooperation; Netherlands crime; taxes and benefits across Africa; ETF liquidity; alcohol taxes; government performance under populists; trade and inequality; violence against adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa
Public goods
📣 new data alert! 📣
Excited to release v1 of the Census Place Project with @enrico_berkes and @EzraKarger
fsb.miamioh.edu/nenckap/
Paper: ezrakarger.com/census_place_p…
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Interesting discussions
Here’s a data download for first round interviews. Wisdom I received and things I learned along the way when I was on the JM last year. Please feel free to add your 2c! (I’ll post my notes on flyouts soon)
long 🧵 1/x
#EconTwitter #EconJobMarket
^nearly every tweet from this thread could be included, on its own, in the newsletter
Abstracts exceeding 200 words are a signal that the authors do not believe the reader’s time is valuable. This is usually bad news about the rest of the paper.
Evan Washington @evanewashington
^discussion in the replies