Best of #econtwitter - Week of February 13, 2022 [1/3]
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 one of three. Part two is here and part three is here.
Paper summary threads

The importance of infrastructure has gotten a lot of attention recently. For historical perspective, a thread on our new working paper on how much people valued Chicago's (expensive!) water and sewer system (with Coury, Kitagawa, and Turner).


Colaicovo, Dalton, Kerr, & @william_r_kerr (2022) document a striking compositional change of the industry composition of the ~10% self-employed in the US over the last 50 years: sharply ⏬share of industries with high startup capital requirements.
🔗 nber.org/papers/w29725




The OLS estimator is BUE, on top of being BLUE, under classic Gauss-Markov conditions — check out @BruceEHansen’s new amazing #econometrica paper. Textbooks require some updating @jmwooldridge? Question: how much a BUE can depart from linearity?


Roses are red
OLS was BLUE
Thanks to Bruce Hansen
Now it's just BUE

Giuseppe Cavaliere @CavaliereGiu

Intergenerational income mobility in Italy, a long 🧵 based on this paper, joint with Paolo Acciari (Italian Ministry of Finance) and @AlbrtPolo, now forthcoming in AEJ: Applied Economics


1/ Wanted to do a new #EconTwitter 🧵 following on my previous 🧵 about structural transformation in SSA
that is more ambitious: my favorite papers presenting causal evidence around structural transformation in dev world broadly

Jessica Leight @leightjessica

Excited to share a new, simple regression adjustment to get causal estimates with longitudinal data!
arxiv.org/abs/2201.13451
Causal inference with longitudinal data is hard!! Why? A 🧵👇
w/ @edwardhkennedy, @robtibshirani, V Ventura, and L Wasserman
1/n

Really enjoyed reading this new review by @SuriTavneet and @chrisudry in JEP. Some things that jumped out at me, focused especially on R&D:

🎉 New working paper! 🎉
“Registering Returning Citizens to Vote”
This is joint work with an amazing interdisciplinary team: @l_eckhouse @kindlyplease @AlliPatter @hlw_phd @ArielRWhite
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
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🚨 Working paper Alert! 🚨
New paper (w/ Aruna Ranganathan, @BerkeleyHaas ) on the impact of digitization on gender inequality in the Hindi film industry ("Bollywood")
Our basic story? Digitization *reduced* female share among playback singers
abhishekn.com/files/Nagaraj_…
🧵👇


🫖➡️🇬🇧➡️🏭
British tea drinking really did power the Industrial Revolution, by vastly increasing the health of the nation. This study shows that the practice of boiling water for tea lowered mortality rates by an amazing 25% in lower water-quality areas! direct.mit.edu/rest/article-a…


Public goods

🚀🔬Public Good alert!🔬🚀 #EconTwitter
@vkbostwick, @SarahHBana, and I are excited to share a guide to postdocs in econ(-adjacent) fields!! We hope this is in time to be useful to current JMCs. See the Table of Contents for topics we cover (1/n)
wytham.rbind.io/post/postdoc-f…


Academia is so confusing and hard to navigate, so want to share my list of the career advice articles and books that I've found most helpful - compiled over the last 18 years (ack) sites.dartmouth.edu/nyhan/academic…

The NBER gatherings will stream on YouTube to support broad dissemination of meeting content as we return to in-person conferences. The Summer Institute schedule may be found here:


A large and carefully assembled data resource on early-life mortality
25 countries, 1,700 combined years, detailed breakdown by age, including week 1, month 1, trimester 1, year 1

Patrick Gerland @Patrick_Gerland