Best of #econtwitter - Week of February 12, 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

Mohammad Akbarpour @akbarpour_

I’ve done that (reneging on an exploding offer), have had serious backlash from the employer, and still believe I did the right thing. Incidentally, that employer never made exploding offers again. I guess I provided a public good?

Shengwu Li @ShengwuLi

I regard people who renege on exploding offers as good citizens providing a valuable public service. https://t.co/uKcvznVsdj

Mohammad Akbarpour @akbarpour_

@mathijs1987j Long, furious, aggressive emails to me and my advisors, and never got invited back to that institution. It was pretty emotionally heavy on me as a graduate student receiving emails from powerful folks. Though one of my advisors wrote following message back to me those days: 1/2

Wouter Leenders @WouterLeenders

When you read a paper entitled "The Distribution of Tax Burden by Income Groups in Greece", you don't expect the first footnote to read "Practically the whole of this research was carried out in the Averof and Itjedin prisons under extremely difficult conditions."

Wouter Leenders @WouterLeenders

He was sentenced to life in prison, where he wrote, left-handedly, his article that would be published by the Economic Journal in 1973 (academic.oup.com/ej/article-abs…). The New York Times had reported earlier: "Greek publishes work from jail"

Ben Golub 🇺🇦 @ben_golub

You could do a three-year Ph.D. and go right to an AP job 40ish years ago, but that job paid around half, in real terms, of what it pays today. Part of the predoc story is probably that real incomes for econ PhD's are rising steeply in both academic and private sector jobs

Tobias Klein @kleintob

Today I came across this hidden gem: Amy Finkelstein’s advice on how to write great research papers in economics. Here I post the slides I like best. Full presentation at econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/spischke…

Timothy Layton @timothyjlayton

The comments on this thoughtful thread are exhibit A for the case that economics should be taught in med school.

Michael L. Barnett @ml_barnett

I have mixed feelings about this @propublica piece. No question UnitedHealth looks very bad. But what are insurers supposed to do for unusual, extreme medical use? Often it is not justified at all. The costs are then just passed on to us. https://t.co/aSMcAJFXE3

Matt Clancy @mattsclancy

Imagine there had been no economics research over the last century. In your opinion, GDP in the Econ-research-free world would be [?] than GDP in our own world.

^poll: +/- 10% or the same

Matt Clancy @mattsclancy

Dropping the "show me the answer" group: - 58% think GDP would be 10%+ lower if we missed out on a century of economic research - 35% think we would be roughly the same - 7% think GDP would be 10%+ higher

Matt Clancy @mattsclancy

Imagine there had been no economics research over the last century. In your opinion, GDP in the Econ-research-free world would be [?] than GDP in our own world.

Arpit Gupta @arpitrage

@mattsclancy My guess is bigger impacts of research on the vol of GDP than growth rates

Journal system delenda est

Ben Golub 🇺🇦 @ben_golub

Periodic reminder that the publication process in economics is badly broken and the few silver linings are not worth it. We are collectively making a choice to make all of us less productive and less happy than we could be.

Benjamin Hansen @benconomics

What are the things we can do to fix it? 1. Cap referee report length to 5 comments or 2 pages or something. 2. Cap review rounds to 1 or 2? The AER Insights model is good 3. Value replication more (critical part of the scientific method)

Ben Golub 🇺🇦 @ben_golub

Periodic reminder that the publication process in economics is badly broken and the few silver linings are not worth it. We are collectively making a choice to make all of us less productive and less happy than we could be.

Toni Whited 🇺🇦 😷 @toniwhited

@ben_golub I'm trying! Explicit instructions to referees not to be shadow coauthors. Limiting the number of rounds. Really fast turnaround.

^JFE

Laura Veldkamp @laura_veldkamp

@ben_golub For a profession that studies incentives, we have remarkably little incentive to contribute the effort needed for a constructive review process that is central to others' professional success.

Public goods

Thad Kousser @ThadKousser

Excited to release a dataset with nearly 4 million tweets by all American state legislators, coded for topic and ideology through supervised learning, here: dataverse.unc.edu/dataset.xhtml?….

dataverse.unc.eduReplication Data for: Do Male and Female Legislators Have Different Twitter Communication Styles?Communication is a fundamental step in the process of political representation, and an influential stream of research hypothesizes that male and fe...