Best of #econtwitter - Week of January 12, 2025: paper summaries
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of the Best of Econtwitter newsletter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
A lot of good stuff in this one:
Econ grad school production function
^just to spell this out: this is looking at advisors who took a sabbatical; the x-axis here is “for a given grad student, how many years after the advisor’s sabbatical did that student graduate”. The median time to graduation in this sample (1998-2014) was 5 years (see figure C1). So, “2 years before graduation” = third year of the PhD
^humongous if true?
(1) third year really matters (R.I.P. to the 2017 and 2018 covid cohorts — i.e., the previous two JM cycles)
(2) empirical evidence that within-cohort competition is, at least to some extent, zero sum
(3) advisors do in fact have some nonzero treatment effect — plausibly even on research quality (as measured by publications)
(4) and, obviously: representation really matters(!!)
They focus on the gender framing, but more broadly, this is the most interesting paper I’ve seen on the econ grad school production function
Other thoughts:
The dataset sounds very intriguing…
Free idea: focusing on the gender component, this also sounds ripe for a movers design — how does the average female grad student fare in the years after a female faculty member leaves the department (there would be more concerns here about selection, i.e. people leaving because it’s a bad environment)
Admittedly the treatment effect here is really quite large… especially considering that this is the average effect across all female students — not just for “this person ended up as an advisee of this person on sabbatical” [which, of course, would be endogenous]
Here’s where the variation is coming from btw:
Idiosyncratic favorites
^there was a twitter hubbub & special edition on this topic of gender polarization last February
^time is underrated
^this isn’t a thread, but it got a lot of attention. Correcting one common misinterpretation (h/t JZM): “The supply increase referenced in the paper is not '1% increase in the total housing stock', instead it is '1% increase in the new housing stock made available'."“
^excellent paper, highly recommend. and excellent meme + summary