Best of #econtwitter - Week of February 14, 2021
www.bestofecontwitter.com
Best of #econtwitter - Week of February 14, 2021
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.
Paper summary threads
An increase of 33.6% in out-of-pocket price (11.0 percentage points (p.p.) change in coinsurance, or $10.40 per drug) causes a 22.6% drop in total drug consumption ($61.20), and a 32.7% increase in monthly mortality (0.048 p.p.) due to to cutbacks in statins and antihypertensives
Amitabh Chandra @amitabhchandra2
^and:
Why did other studies did not detect mortality?
To measure a 10% increase in mortality when baseline risk of mortality is 1%, need to randomize 325,000 patients. Oregon treatment group was 9,000 patients; RAND randomized ~5,500 patients; typical physicians has ~1500 patients
^also: related paper on cost-sharing in MRIs
For the small number of people who are not totally sick of #minimumwage threads, let me walk you through some of the @UW team's findings for #Seattle now that they've cleared peer review (conditionally accepted, AEJ:EP).
A lot of them are packed into this one picture.
We show that (1) teen exposure to the 1970s oil crises decreases later life driving, and (2) this is a general phenomenon (using all state-year gas price variation from 1966-2010).
This picture sums it up ('70s oil crises in red, driving behavior in **year 2000** on y-axis):
The latest and greatest job market strategy is to be beautiful.
Galina Hale @galinahale_ucsc
^lots of discussion (eg) since everyone loves navel-gazing. Obviously (“obviously”?), this evidence is correlational
So what do we find? In short, when facing similar civilians in comparable places and times, officers from marginalized groups engage in much less enforcement activity & violence than their white and male counterparts. 6/
^see also: testing the Becker model of discrimination
New working paper on causal effects of codetermination: "Voice at Work". @jarkko_harju, @Schoefer_B and I study the 1991 introduction of a worker right to shared governance in Finnish firms with 150+ employees. economics.mit.edu/files/21196
Excited to post a new paper on the effects of long-run contact on attitudes, political preferences, and altruism!
Joint work with the fantastic Leo Bursztyn, Thomas Chaney, and Tarek Hassan.
bit.ly/3cVrtQy (1/11)
We often say that networks exhibit homophily in that similar people are more likely to be connected.
But how much of this is actually "love of the same" — preferences for forming ties with similar others?
New experimental evidence of partisan homophily:
doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2…
Our work (w/ @RaphaelGouvea_ ) on the politics of municipal budgets in Brazil is now online at JDE.
We find that left-wing mayors don't increase the size of the city government. They do try raise the share of social spending, but face constraints.
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
[1/6]
Maybe laptops aren't so bad in class after all
Paul Bruno @Paul__Bruno
More: model of automation and inequality; licensing transistors; informational interventions as salience effects?; ag subsidies; euro asset purchases; social security solvency and adaptive learning
Public goods
A very non-scientific experiment to try to offer information to the people who need it. Have a question you wish you knew the answer to, but you're afraid of asking on #EconTwitter? Let me ask for you.
📢📢Trying something new: Instead of waiting 10 years until our judicial bias paper publishes, we are posting the public data RIGHT AWAY.
80 million cases, 80k judges, the near universe of Indian lower court cases from 2010–2018. 🧵 1/5
Details: devdatalab.medium.com/big-data-for-j…
Interesting discussions
1. Authors post their replication repos
2. Grad students can try to download and replicate
3. If they succeed, the journal puts a *replicated* emoji on the article, credits the grad student.
4. Authors develop reputations for having replicable papers.
20/N
A critical error that I see many grad students make: they try to estimate Frankenstein's model. Rather than viewing a model as answering a research question, they view a model as an arbitrary hodgepodge of models they learned about in their classes.
I've completed a couple of years of doing referee reports and I admit that it would be great if editors provide brief feedback to the reviewers of how useful the report was for their decision (other than inferring it from the decision letter). Does this happen in any journal?
I've seen surprisingly little #EconTwitter advice for second years, so here's a short thread with three pieces of advice I found helpful when reading papers to prepare for field exams. [1/4]
Dear #EconTwitter,
Are there papers that estimate how much top-five publications affect your career as an economist (how many top fields = 1 top five)?
Thank you!!
@JaminSpeer @datacrat It is insane that this is the approach. For example, AEJ Applied has a lower acceptance rate than AER. I would bet lots of money there is wild variability in acceptance rates across fields at T5. And yet, we tend not to think carefully about these facts and what they imply. [1/n]
