Best of #econtwitter - Week of January 29, 2023: paper summaries
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.
Paper summaries
New paper! Here's the one-minute version. There's a puzzle I've been thinking about for a long time. Wealthy countries tend to be happier...
Is it social comparison? One way to get a hint is to look at things that people often compare, like income. And wow, income is 7 times more important for people's happiness in rice areas.
Do individuals seek to limit or enable their ability to distort beliefs? How do these choices affect behavior?
New paper w @m_serra_garcia in AER today!
Enabling or Limiting Cognitive Flexibility?Evidence of Demand for Moral Commitment
aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…
@AEAjournals
1/9
^and/or:
Do individuals seek to limit or enable their ability to distort beliefs? How do these choices affect behavior?
New paper w/ @silvia_saccardo in AER!
Enabling or Limiting Cognitive Flexibility?Evidence of Demand for Moral Commitment
aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…
@AEAjournals
1/9
🚨🚨🚨 New working paper! In a field experiment on an online labor market, job applicants who had access to algorithmic writing assistance on their resumes were more likely to get hired. Thread on why this matters.
With @zanmuny @johnjhorton
drive.google.com/file/d/1BeUpq1…
\1
There is a strong correlation between the number of writing errors in an applicant’s resume and the likelihood they get hired. Here is the correlation between % words spelled right & p(hired) in a large online labor market. \3
Fascinating to see how US banks profit off of credit cards users. For customers with low credit scores, the majority of bank revenues are in the form of interest. For sophisticated customers (i.e. high credit score), revenue is mostly from interchange.
federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/f…
Now in @apsrjournal: We report striking experimental evidence on how politicians bargain, with data from over 1,100 sitting politicians in five countries who agreed to participate in modified ultimatum games./1
🚨New 📜: Assaying Anomalies (w/ Robert Novy-Marx)🚨
❓ How do we evaluate new return predictors in the cross-section of equities (aka anomalies)?
👉 We propose a protocol for understanding and testing the robustness of new anomalies
👇🧵 to follow (1/12)
papers.ssrn.com/abstract=43380…
Can cash transfers be harmful?
Nearly everything I see on Twitter highlights the beneficial effects of cash, so I thought I'd share a few examples where cash programs had detrimental effects. 1/n
Want to shape the law? Write a Wikipedia article.
Clever paper created detailed Wikipedia articles on 77 Irish Supreme Court cases, and finds those cases are more likely to be cited by lower courts... who also echo the language of the Wikipedia articles! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
More paper summaries
🚨New working paper on effect of union dissolution on children's test scores🚨 @mathildelholm, @EskilHeinesen, and I use Danish administrative data including national test scores to study how union dissolution affects children's learning 1/n osf.io/preprints/soca…
^divorce, not labor unions
Wherein @Samantha_Burn @timothyjlayton @borisvabson and I take on the unenviable task of defending medical paperwork:
"Rationing Medicine Through Bureaucracy: Authorization Restrictions in Medicare"
on NBER: nber.org/papers/w30878
and ungated:
Why would companies bunch at 100, 200, and 500 employees? The answer lies in discrimination law. The Civil Rights Act of 1991 limits damages, provided they are under given number of employees. This has strongly negative results on the economy!
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
I don’t think people fully appreciate that high inflation in the US and the Euro area is over. We are back at 2%
Part of the high inflation perception today is measurement: instantaneous inflation in December is 2% instead of the conventional measure of 6.5%
1/9
