Best of #econtwitter - Week of January 1, 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.
A slightly different format this week (also, gmail may cut off the email, and you would need to open in the browser to see all tweets). Feedback, as always, is welcome.
Best of’s
These are dense:
It's that time again - my list of 10 of the most thought-provoking, surprising, and rigorous studies in health care in 2022!
Themes this year:
1) Care delivery changes that work (and don't)
2) Race and health care
3) Natural experiments in the ED
+ a few misc. cool papers
2022 has been a fantastic year for papers about growth/innovation and firm heterogeneity. Here is a short thread summarising the ones I enjoyed reading the most.
In no particular order 🧵👇
Here are the 5 best papers I read in 2022 that you should read too:
1. "The Economics of Intangible Capital" by Crouzet, Eberly, Eisfeldt, and Papanikolaou
kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/crouze…
My 🏆 Best-of-2022 🏆 list of quant marketing papers 👇👇
(1) "Vertical Contracts with Endogenous Product Selection: An Empirical Analysis of Vendor-Allowance Contracts" by @hristakevas in the Journal of Political Economy.
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.10…
Paper summaries
Recently, me, @JessamynSchall1, and Joe Sabia (@SDSUCHEPS) investigated teen suicide and in person schooling. This extends on earlier work I did with Matt Lang. 1/n
NBER @nberpubs
Having found historic school calendars are predictive of the heterogeneity in the seasonality of youth suicide, we turn to Covid, which offered the largest disruption to in person schooling we've seen in our lifetimes. We find suicides fell for youth when schools closed. 5/n
In memory of @MartinRavallion, who just passed away, let me share a 2010 paper of his: "Do Poorer Countries Have Less Capacity for Redistribution?".
He shows that 37 low-income countries don't have the resources to alleviate stark poverty (even) by expropriating the non-poor.
Recent applications of deep learning in science and engineering, such as AlphaFold and Copilot, have been astonishing. What does standard economic growth theory say about the economic effects of its adoption in R&D? We sketch a simple picture: arxiv.org/abs/2212.08198
This paper by @taka_adachi argues that we don’t need game theory to model imperfect competition. Makes sense. It wasn’t obvious to me which approach should be predominant.
^provoked some kind of interesting discussion on game theory from Itai Sher, also Glen Weyl and Alex Imas, also Emre Ozdenoren
What happened when Wellesley College switched to pass/fail grading for first semester students?
It caused grades for the class to drop by 23% of a standard deviation, apparently due to lower effort & preparation by students. But no effect on later grades. nber.org/papers/w30798
Evidence supports this policy. When state supreme courts introduced mandatory retirement (age-based term limits) in recent decades, performance of the court (quantity and quality of rulings) went up.
Paper link: elliottash.com/wp-content/upl…
and coming soon to @AEAjournals Policy
Ro Khanna @RoKhanna
As the world becomes more punitive, demand for prisons is growing faster than supply. These patterns deteriorate prison conditions.
And what happens when prisons deteriorate? A thread on my job market paper, in print today at @restatjournal
Wage-price spirals
Olivier is making an important point that inflation comes from distributional conflict, but getting a lot of pushback. In my view misplaced.
This prompts me to share some research that explores this view of inflation with Guido Lorenzoni.
Olivier Blanchard @ojblanchard1
^Blanchard thread on “distributional conflict” theory of inflation provokes Werning thread on paper with Lorenzoni — toy model note; Blanchard replies and again; Krugman interjects with an analogy(?), again; Delong and Glasner; but most usefully:
*** Inflation and wages
A long time ago, Jordi Gali, Mark Gertler and Argia Sbordone noted: with sticky prices, inflation is expected to accelerate when marginal costs are temporarily low. Intuitively, costs will rise back, and as they do, firms will raise prices.
🧵1/12
And 1930's deflation was caused by distributional conflict. Everyone wanted a smaller share of the pie.
This is semantic. We need AD to pin down a nominal anchor.
^Cochrane similarly; more from Rowe here and here and
If you talk about the equilibrating process (as you should), Supply and Demand is a conflict theory.
Buyers want to buy 100 apples, but sellers want to sell 90 (or vice versa). That's a conflict over how many apples get traded. That conflict causes the price to rise (or fall).
Lorenzoni replies
Job market papers
^cf
Very happy to share my JMP, w. @LobeckMax:
“The Consequences of Inequality: Beliefs and Redistributive Preferences” bit.ly/3NxKokO
We explore (i) how people think economic inequality changes society, and (ii) how such beliefs affect preferences for redistribution. 1/n
🚨 Job Market Paper Alert 🚨
Many governments provide disaster preparedness information, but does this change people’s behavior?
In my JMP, I use a large-scale RCT in flood-prone urban Mozambique with data from over 25,000 photos to show it does!
A JMP thread 🧵#EconTwitter
🧵JMP:
Several contributions indicate the relevance of household financial positions for the propagation of macro shocks.
❓Question: Should the government care about household borrowing conditions?
My JMP suggests that it should!
Econ Job Market Helper @econ_jmp
The time has come: hello #EconTwitter! I am a microeconomist & on the 2022-2023 job market. My research agenda focuses on ways to encourage inmates’ social reintegration. See a thread below!
My website: williamarbour.com
My job market paper: github.com/williamarbour/…
Job market paper thread! We examine how manufacturer payments💵to physicians👩⚕️👨⚕️ affect the adoption of a new medical device ⚙️, with particular attention to whether payments work through "information" 😇 vs "persuasion" 👿. (1/22)
Paper on my website: alexeverhartphd.com/jmp
More paper summaries
In this paper we evaluate the performance of ML techniques to improve tax auditing efficiency. How can we assess the performance of our ML algorithms?
NBER @nberpubs
