Best of #econtwitter - Week of December 18, 2022: paper summaries
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Best of #econtwitter - Week of December 18, 2022: paper summaries
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.
A slightly different format this week (also, gmail may cut off the email, and you would need to open in the browser to see all tweets). Feedback, as always, is welcome.
Paper summaries
A 🧵 on our work on US mortality change, just out in AEJ:App, with @thesamasher and @CharlieRafkin.
We ask: how concentrated is the U.S. pre-Covid mortality crisis? Is everyone doing a little worse, or is a small subset doing catastrophically worse?
The graph is a spoiler 1/N
This is how the trends look once you hold ranks constant. From 1992–2018, most White Americans have been doing fine mortality-wise — but the least educated 10% have faced catastrophic mortality increases. 9/N
It’s not just deaths of despair — suicide, alcohol and drug overdose. These explain about half of the mortality loss among middle-aged White Americans.
Mortality from all other causes is rising too. 12/N
^interesting application, but also important conceptual point about interpreting these kinds of conditional means more generally:
Don't let your friends condition time series graphs on education levels! It's easy to do this correctly!
17/17
^i.e.: “who is a HS dropout in 1965” is not the same as “who is a HS dropout in 2015”, and this makes a LOT of graphs you see on the internet useless. They develop a nice partial identification methodology for addressing these selection issues
"The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to
Innovation in the United States" w\ @shaibrn, Tim McQuade, Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, @bibipousada
First-gen immigrants represent 16% of US-based inventors, and 23% of patents.
New data to share!
web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/BDMP…
🧵
^early death instrument
Delighted that "Who Benefits From Attending Effective High Schools?" with Sebastian Kiguel, Shanette C Porter, John Q Easton has just been accepted for publication in the Journal of Labor Economics.
WP version: works.bepress.com/c_kirabo_jacks…
Neat new article in JDE by @MiguelTalamas shows evidence of a highly negative effect of grandmothers' deaths on mothers' employment rates (⬇️ 12 pp)
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
I wanted to make public 3 lectures in open economy macro that I had the pleasure to give at CREI Barcelona (100% based on joint work with Emmanuel Farhi).
Topics: Optimal Currency Areas, Fiscal Unions, Global Financial Cycle, Capital Controls, Mobility, Macropru policies.
1/n🧵
I am happy to announce that our paper "Financial Frictions and the Wealth Distribution" has been conditionally accepted for publication at @ecmaEditors
sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Finan…
This paper makes some innovations that I hope will have a durable impact on macro
A short 🧵 1/7
Metrics pop-up section
On transforming your dependent variable:
We've all encountered this problem: "I want to take logs, but my data have zeros => ???"
Commonly (myself included), people use an ad hoc transformation m(.) (e.g. m(x) = arcsinh(x)) that approximates log, and interprets the resulting effect as a %
🧵of paper with @jondr44 1/n
Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna @pedrohcgs
^more
New paper by @JohnMullahy and @healtheconnort1:
"Why Transform Y? A Critical Assessment of Dependent-Variable Transformations in Regression Models for Skewed and Sometimes-Zero Outcomes"
2 useful papers today on how you can get basically any answer you want from regressions using arcsinh(y) or log(y+1)
I made these graphs to show the problem: The mean of the transformed var (black lines) varies like crazy by what units you choose for y
🧵 on my own take-aways
JMPs
You know that people should only vote if it's going to be "pivotal" in deciding the election
Strategic voting also suggests you should vote *as if* it's otherwise deadlocked 50-50, and update based on what what that state implies. James Pinnington JMP:
Appendix
1/x US yield curve inversions have a reputation for predicting recessions.
But @menzie_chinn and I show that foreign yield curves predict US recession risk in a surprisingly robust way too. Here's what we find 🧵
NBER @nberpubs
🚨 New Paper 🚨
"Pay-As-You-Go Insurance: Experimental Evidence on Consumer Demand and Behavior"
I partnered with insurtech start-up @with_Hugo to launch a new contract into the CA auto insurance market (where 17% of drivers are uninsured!!) to test barriers to coverage.
🧵:
Hugo Insurance @with_Hugo
🚨New Working Paper🚨
With @toby_handfield & Matthew Kopec
We investigate the determinants of compassion fade and the mechanism, by which it operates.
Thread below 👇
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
My paper “Endogenous Technology, Scarring and Fiscal Policy” is now also available as a BoF Discussion Paper!
@SuomenPankki
Link: publications.bof.fi/bitstream/hand…
#FiscalMultiplier #LongRun #Growth #Hysteresis
A short 🧵to summarize what it is about:
🚨New working paper🚨 “Inflation Since COVID: Demand or Supply,” with @giulia_gitti. We find that the US Phillips curve flattened during COVID and subsequently steepened by a factor of >3 relative to pre-COVID. shorturl.at/filY6 #EconTwitter 1/10
