Best of #econtwitter - Week of December 20, 2020
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s (belated, holiday) edition of Best of Econtwitter. Thanks to those sharing suggestions, over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
Paper summary threads
New @nberpubs paper on estimating the Value of Time (VOT)
Prices and wait times on @lyft app were randomized across 14 million sessions in a dozen large US markets
with Goldszmidt, List, Muir, Smith, & Wang
nber.org/papers/w28208
ideas.repec.org/p/feb/natura/0… ungated
\thread
Very happy to announce that my paper “The macroeconomic effects of oil supply news: Evidence from OPEC announcements” has been accepted at the 𝘼𝙢𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙀𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙤𝙢𝙞𝙘 𝙍𝙚𝙫𝙞𝙚𝙬. To celebrate, let me briefly summarize the main insights and conclusions (Thread).
Another look at our most recent working paper. The accompanying plot shows that while on average hiring an additional officer yields important public safety returns, this benefit does not accrue to cities w/ high Black population shares while also producing more low-level arrests
NBER @nberpubs
Huge effects of Year Up, a job training program for young adults, on income. RCT by Fein, Destrup, and Burnett, summarized here by @Arnold_Ventures
1/n Need holiday reading?
New paper w/ 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐜 𝐌𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐳:
"𝐴𝑔𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑒-𝐷𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐴𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑓 𝑆𝑢𝑝𝑝𝑙𝑦 𝐷𝑖𝑠𝑟𝑢𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠: 𝑇𝘩𝑒 𝐸𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑦-𝐸𝑥𝑖𝑡 𝑀𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑖𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑟"
tinyurl.com/yc3j7g2t
Slides tinyurl.com/y8yt4dbm
A Thread
Disadvantaged students experience the largest improvements from attending highly effective schools.
However, advantaged students are much more likely to attend highly effective schools.
nber.org/papers/w28194
Our main goal here is to explain how one can transparently use DiD procedures in setups with (a) multiple time periods, (b) variation in treatment timing (staggered adoption), and (c) when a parallel trends is plausible potentially only after conditioning on covariates.
2/n
@ATabarrok We just posted a paper on this: exclusion increases valuations by a huge amount even when actual supply is kept constant papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
“Mimetic Dominance and the Economics of Exclusion”
Glad to see Deaton and Schreyer discussing the biases of GDP when comparing countries' material wealth. Often AIC is clearly superior because GDP substantially overstates material wealth in investment hubs and resource-rich countries. nber.org/system/files/w…
More: on parental leave; home bias in credit ratings; downward nominal wage rigidity; large firms and employment volatility.
Job market papers
Check out this very thorough paper shedding more light on the importance of migration in the housing bubble.
This pair of graphs is a nice window into the "forced segregation by planning department" process that is strangling the US economy while inducing bubble-phobia.
Gregor Schubert @gregorschub
Public goods
Pascal Michaillat (@pmichaillat) created a fantastic public good: a wonderful & comprehensive overview of macro-labor/search&matching models of the labor market, w/ notes&videos:
pascalmichaillat.org/t1.html
UI, payroll taxes, min wages, business cycles--all in one coherent framework!
We have a new version of our twowayfeweights #Stata package! Main change: the package now covers two way FE regressions with several treatments, following the result in new short paper with Xavier D'Haultfoeuille papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… 1/n
Interesting discussions
0/ A holiday economic theory reading list. Some of my favorite pieces on theory that can be read with minimal sweat, but with the maximal intellectual reward. In no particular order:
There have been a lot of relatively-new econ MA programs that focus heavily on applied econometrics (usually causal inference and/or time series) and coding, with an aim of training for the private sector. Which of these programs are top-tier? Where should I advise UGs to look?
To make it easier to read JMPs blinded to the candidate's identity (for those who want to do so), here's a suggestion for job app portals like @JOE_listings: Ask applicants to also submit a JMP version without name, school, acknowledgements etc.
I think public refereeing might be a good thing, but even if we don't adopt it we can go part of the way there and achieve most of the gains. How about a system where for reports 'stick' to a paper and can be re-used by editors at other journals - with opt-in from both referee 2/
@snaidunl @paulkrugman @BetseyStevenson @JustinWolfers Perfect competition a lot simpler to understand than oligopoly or monopolistic competition. Not hard to explain it is a very special case.
^debate on teaching intro micro
statistics is the most beautiful and egalitarian discipline of all of those i have studied, because when we are confused about anything in statistics we are almost always confused about the elementary, foundational concepts
^thread