Best of #econtwitter - Week of February 20, 2022 [2/3]
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.
This is part two of three. Part one is here and part two is here.
Paper summary threads
New results from a 20-year follow-up on Progresa.
Children whose parents received cash transfers in Mexico 20 years ago earn 15% more than those who didn't
povertyactionlab.org/sites/default/…
^a lot of good commentary in the replies about fadeout, eg 1, 2
Incredibly striking similarity between US and France in the relationship between parental income and college attendance
- and surprising given the massive differences in cost of attending college between the two countries.
(new work by @bonneau_cecile & Sebastien Grobon)
[1/3]
Thomas Piketty @PikettyLeMonde
^also a lot of good discussion in the replies, eg same curve for Germany; “tuition is near free in France”
A thread on BUE & BLUE🔥
Gauss-Markov condition:
1) y=Xβ+ε
2) E[ε|X]=0
3) Cov(ε|X)=σ^2Σ
Standard GM:
4) Σ=I
The GM thm shows that OLS/GLS is BL(inear)UE.
Hansen (’20) shows it holds for all unbiased est (inc. nonlinear) w/ an elegant proof (tilted density + Cramer-Rao)
1/n
Giuseppe Cavaliere @CavaliereGiu
Not exactly. I like Bruce's approach in this paper and it yields nice insights. But in twitter and private exchanges last week, and what I've learned since, it seems that the class of estimators in play in Theorem 5 include only estimators that are linear in Y.
#metricstotheface
Borelli @BorelliLuan
Thanks @jondr44! A thread on this short paper 🧵
(no econometric toys are harmed in the writing of this paper)
Jonathan Roth @jondr44
Happy Black History Month- today I want to talk about protests, and specifically whether protests can work to influence economic redistribution using evidence from our newish paper here:researchgate.net/publication/35… 1/n
In a randomised trial with 18k+ participants with suicidal ideation, "training of dialectical behavior therapy skills (mindfulness, mindfulness of current emotion, opposite action, and paced breathing)" raised the risk of self-harm relative to usual care.
Very cool new tinyurl.com/nberp! Losing a job has very different implications across Europe. For Northern Europeans, 5 years after job displacement, earnings are 10% lower than before, while the loss is 3X larger for Southern Europeans (Italy, Portugal, and Spain). 1/3
NBER @nberpubs
Public goods
47 journals with explicit short paper options where economists publish their research
An annotated list: bit.ly/36qNVfn
[And a thread]
Excellent new packages for synthetic control estimation and inference in r, python, and stata
arxiv.org/abs/2202.05984
nppackages.github.io/scpi/
The nppackages.github.io nppackages group sets the standard for serious econometrics work paired with good software
New harmonized data set tracking ~80m people for 2-3 quarters; 49 countries across five continents, covering wide range of economic development.
Looks like more and more data will be provided online, which seems like a public service worth highlighting:
Metrics GIFs
I find animations useful to teach metrics to undergrads. I believe it improves understanding to see what goes on. Here is a thread with my favorite GIFs, most of them are re-makes of stuff from #EconTwitter.
This one I have seen several versions of before. It illustrates attenuation bias with classic measurement error in x.
My latest addition to my GIF collection is this one which illustrates fixed effects by demeaning x and y. It also demonstrates Simpson's paradox + shows that demeaning of y does not change the slope coefficient (cf. regression anatomy vs Frisch-Waugh).
^more in thread