Best of #econtwitter - Week of February 26, 2023: interesting tweets
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Best of #econtwitter - Week of February 26, 2023: interesting tweets
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.
Interesting discussions
Fascinating piece by Torsten Slok arguing that declining survey response rates are making data more volatile. More volatile data is making markets more volatile. This is raising uncertainty, and may damage growth.
During Covid, there was lots of pedagogy experimentation—prerecord, flipped classroom etc. My sense this is all just gone now: presumably it turned out, despite all the hype, not to be a sufficient improvement over status quo (perhaps worse). Is that right/others’ experience?
^(replies)
In conversations about the pros and cons of academic vs nonacademic jobs I’ve been surprised that the rise of remote work hasn’t moved more beliefs about the relative flexibility of these two sectors.
For example, one of our economists works from his sailboat in the Caribbean, and has so since 2020. More generally, talking to economists in places that are no longer fully remote, seems like plenty of people come in 1-2 times a week
Was asked by a senior colleague about the advantages of LaTeX over MS Word, and as I responded with my honest opinions (LaTeX has a learning curve but has lots of benefits) I could hear a part of my brain whispering "this sounds like total nonsense"
I spent a non-trivial amount of time this week fighting with Stata's "file write" command to produce LaTeX files. It turns out that inserting ` and $ into said files can be a massive pain because of how Stata interprets these special characters.
Here's what I found to work:
LaTeX is a horrible format and should not exist. More than that, unless you are physically printing something out it does not belong in a pdf. the year is 2023 and every academic publication known to man makes me zoom in on pdfs like a cave man on mobile. just use html.
^as always: inclusions are not endorsements
For instance:
“X reduced recidivism” or
“X had a beneficial effect on recidivism”
instead of
“X had a negative effect on recidivism”
That last (v common) option is confusing in practice. Does a negative effect in this context mean recidivism went up? Avoid that ambiguity!
The whole "do not make exploding offers" debate sounds very much like "economics should not be applied to our job market, it is ok for all other job markets".
Thanks for the many replies. I did not expect this amount of discussion but I have read a lot of good arguments. It is certainly true that I am no expert in this field and hence I might have missed things. Let me add some details that are important to understand why I wrote this:
Situations when another study using the same instrument (W) as you *doesn't* imply an exclusion restriction violation
10 years after we created Registered Reports, the thing critics told us would never happen has happened: @Nature is offering them
Congratulations @Magda_Skipper & team. The @RegReports initiative just went up a gear and we are one step closer to eradicating publication bias.
Mary Elizabeth @meharpist
Very pleased with the new release!
Great toolbox to solve heterogeneous agent models in macro #EconTwitter
You can now simulate with transition matrices and calculate Jacobians. All you need to connect it with the Sequence Space Jacobian Toolbox to solve a HANK model!
Alan Lujan @alanlujan91
