Best of #econtwitter - Week of February 21, 2021 [1/2]
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 one of two. Part two is here.
Paper summary threads

Excited we finally have a draft of this paper, which attempts to provide a 'unifying theory' of the long economic divergence between the Middle East & Western Europe
As we see it, there are 3 recent theories that hit on important aspects of the divergence...
1/

CEPR @cepr_org

How "risky" does someone need to be to justify pretrial detention under current law? @sandy_mayson and I lay out the legal & empirical framework to answer this. We show that jail is so harmful that virtually no one is "dangerous" enough to warrant it. 1/
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…


One of my favorite papers* just got a new draft, so I thought it would be a great time to do a thread about it! Tldr: the fact that recessions hurt younger, poorer workers more means that they are worse for all of us
*my wife’s JMP


1/ GLOBAL Suicidology 2020
World-first data!
Every nation so far that has reported its suicide rates for 2020, compared to previous years. No change since 2019 (but down from 2017).
Despite a global pandemic, no current evidence suggests a 2020 rise in suicides.


Fascinating new paper on the economics of mental health by @MariekeJBos, Andreas Hertzberg, and @andreslib: when Swedish men get a diagnosis of a mental illness at age 18, this leads to increased unemployment, illness, and death later in life. drive.google.com/file/d/1KLxcvH…


🚨Preprint Update🚨
The work now includes a new preregistered dataset: it confirms our finding of a near universal decrease in life satisfaction during adolescence. >99% of 🇬🇧 and 🇩🇪 adolescents are estimated to experience a decline between 10-24y. psyarxiv.com/y8ruw


SCC nerd alert: Stern & Stiglitz are out with a new take that's bound to make some waves.
The upshot: It's a cogent critique of 'traditional' approaches.
But: their 'recommendation' is an SCC ~$100/tCO₂ by 2030.
That's *lower* than what the 'traditionalists' get to by now!


My new paper
“Generalized Social Marginal Welfare Weights Imply Inconsistent Comparisons of Tax Policies”
Comments welcome!
Link here: drive.google.com/file/d/1v7vYCj…


JDE Forthcoming (with @anamibanez and @dany_bahar): we evaluate the labor market impacts of the regularization of nearly half a million Venezuelan refugees in Colombia in 2018. We find negligible effects of the program on formal Colombian workers:
sandravrozo.com/wp-content/upl…


Nutshell: We test four ways of measuring willingness to pay (WTP) in rural Uganda. Some have nice advantages for the researcher, but might reduce participants' comprehension or willingness to report their "true" WTP. All four work great, good news for users! 2/9


Hello #EconTwitter,
I'm thrilled to share my work: “Are car-free centers detrimental to the periphery? Evidence from the pedestrianization of the Parisian riverbank” (1/9)
#UrbanEconomics #EnvironmentalEconomics
drive.google.com/file/d/15yLPpa…
@Polytechnique @CrestUmr @XDepEco

Public goods

Check out @BlattnerLaura's 15 rules for grad school but many are actually for life. Haven't seen this doc before but these are v good
dropbox.com/s/8hfsfw21fvbn…
No. 1: Remind yourself how much you have been given
More excerpts in screenshots



🚨🚨 PUBLIC GOOD ALERT 🚨🚨
Have you needed old Area Health Resource Files & been bummed HRSA only has the most recent 1-2 years of data online?
We have good news, AHRFs 2004-present now in citeable format
Please share for those who may benefit (1/3)
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…


Editing my CV often requires fighting and winning against Word's built-in formatting. It's time to quit and shift to LaTeX. Has anyone come across good LaTeX templates for academic / econ CVs?
#EconTwitter

New short paper option in Development.
List of other short papers, by @Dweepobotee:
github.com/Dweepobotee/Ec…

Tom Vogl @tom_vogl
Interesting discussions

A frequent error I see students make is thinking that they can account for "the effect of X on Y is different for group A vs group B" by adding group as a regression control variable. This is incorrect! So I made a graph.


@ii1111 @phl43 @gerdosi If you think that taller people earn more, but think that height is more important for men's earnings than women's, just pointing out that men are taller on average won't help you see how the effect differs between men and women.