Best of #econtwitter - Week of January 24, 2021 (1/2)
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.
Rare(?) double issue this week because of the continued high volume of papers! Part two is here.
Paper summary threads
Ben Golub@ben_golub
Think that evolution selects for correct beliefs over mistaken beliefs? Maybe not
Jonathan “Social Distancing” Libgober @JlibDoesEcon
New paper alert!
Evolutionarily Stable (Mis)specification: Theory and Application, joint with Kevin He (not on twitter)
https://t.co/xOysPPW00Y
Thread below: 1/8 https://t.co/Ru3NeLudg1
6:52 PM · Jan 16, 2021
1 Repost · 22 Likes
Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak@mushfiq_econ
Educated, skilled workers are more likely to emigrate away from polluted cities. This affects aggregate productivity and welfare, and also explains ~14% of an enduring macro-development puzzle:
Why do people remain in low-productivity areas when big cities offer higher wages?
Yale Economic Growth Center @YaleEGC
#NewStudy
EGC Discussion Paper No. 1083
"The Productivity Consequences of Pollution-Induced Migration in China" by @mushfiq_econ of EGC/@YaleSOM/@YaleRISE, @econgaurav of @GPS_UCSD, @WenquanLiang of Jinan U & Ran Song of @yalenus
Read it: https://t.co/WVAy6oE9dw #EconTwitter https://t.co/kWpLblpfkC
5:19 PM · Jan 21, 2021
33 Reposts · 125 Likes
Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak@mushfiq_econ
Implication for aggregative productivity and pollution policy?
Emigration response of the skilled means that the unskilled left behind become less productive. Skilled and unskilled workers are complements in production in China. Asymmetric migration creates a spatial mismatch
5:19 PM · Jan 21, 2021
4 Likes
Michael McCullough@ME_McCullough
Wow! This study, with 1.7M observations from 33K people, shows that income (in log units), contrary to prev claims, does predict happiness all the way up the income scale. The relationship
>$75K is as strong as <$75K.
bit.ly/38XjGPQ
I bet @jean_twenge could say more.
3:56 PM · Jan 20, 2021
205 Reposts · 762 Likes
(^note this is a correlation)
Fiona Greig@FionaGreigDC
We find that some individuals respond to stock market rises with spending “splurges” on credit cards, changing their normal spending by 2-3x their normal spending in a given month following increases in stock prices. 2/6
3:38 PM · Jan 21, 2021
3 Likes
Robert Dur@DurRobert
"Folks that grew up listening to stories where tricksters often fail
to deceive their victims are more trusting and prosperous today."
Fascinating paper by Stelios Michalopoulos and Melanie Meng Xue @Melanie_Xue: economics.harvard.edu/files/economic… forthcoming in @QJEHarvard
6:05 AM · Jan 22, 2021
38 Reposts · 102 Likes
David Evans@DaveEvansPhD
Do people stay poor because of their abilities or because of "differences in opportunities which stem from differences in wealth"? In Bangladesh, the latter: "We identify a threshold level of initial assets above which households accumulate assets ... and grow out of poverty."
John B. Holbein @JohnHolbein1
Seems like an important question:
"Why Do People Stay Poor?"
https://t.co/RqLgkkYQex https://t.co/xZfXL4XVRE
2:01 PM · Jan 22, 2021
64 Reposts · 234 Likes
Florian Ederer@florianederer
Backus, @conlon_chris & @MSinkinson have a fabulous new paper on #CommonOwnership.
Following a rich intellectual history from Bresnahan (1982) to @steventberry-@PhilHaile (2014) it proposes a new test to discriminate between models of firm conduct.
drive.google.com/file/d/14gqPUu…
8:03 PM · Jan 18, 2021
22 Reposts · 68 Likes
Matthew Wilson@MGWilsonEcon
My coauthor @andrewrsimon and I have a paper (R&R at JUE) exploring exactly this question: when to have centralized vs decentralized minimum wage setting?
github.com
mattwilsonky/papers
4:30 PM · Jan 21, 2021
1 Repost · 16 Likes
Anna Stansbury@annastansbury
The expansion of broadband increased online vacancy posting and job search, reduced firms' likelihood of reporting recruitment problems, increased re-employment rates, and increased indicators of match quality (wage and tenure in first job)
8:32 PM · Jan 22, 2021
1 Like
^“broadband expansion may have led steady state unemployment to fall from around 5% to 4% in Norway”
Joshua Goodman@JoshuaSGoodman
Our article evaluating a massive nudge-style campaign to increase college enrollment is now live at the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
TLDR: We nudged 800,000+ people to apply for federal financial aid and college enrollment didn't budge.
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
3:00 PM · Jan 24, 2021
122 Reposts · 399 Likes
Public goods
Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak@mushfiq_econ
The 'Structural Transformation & Economic Growth' program @cepr_org has put together a fabulous course on macro-development, open to all econ Ph.D. students and faculty. Macro-development is a small field with scattered faculty, so this is a brilliant idea mailchi.mp/cepr/steg-annu…
2:33 PM · Jan 19, 2021
110 Reposts · 411 Likes
Semra Sevi@semrasevi
🚨Curious about how to interpret regression tables? I created a guide for my undergraduate students.🤓
👉semrasevi342192471.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/guide-… 👈
#AcademicTwitter @AcademicChatter
semrasevi342192471.files.wordpress.com
3:11 PM · Jan 22, 2021
86 Reposts · 505 Likes
Michael Ewens@startupecon
🧵Motivated by this @toniwhited tweet, my coauthors and I used a simple latex package to try to improve our response to referee(s). Here's how we did it. #EconTwitter 1/8
Toni Whited @toniwhited
The LaTeX line numbering/cross referencing package is your friend here. Use it.
10:45 PM · Jan 19, 2021
14 Reposts · 44 Likes
Econ-adjacent
David Broockman@dbroockman
How do you write a PAP in practice, especially in limited time?
Regardless of how you feel about @The_JOP’s new policy, a lot of political scientists will be writing PAPs for the first time.
I wanted to share my experiences/thoughts having written many PAPs.
Thread follows..🧵
8:08 PM · Jan 17, 2021
121 Reposts · 366 Likes
Dr. Paige Harden@kph3k
The “Should we get rid of the GRE?” conversation and the “Should we pay undergrad RAs $15/hour?” conversation have three things in common that I think are really unfortunate — 🧵
3:27 PM · Jan 19, 2021
99 Reposts · 639 Likes
Interesting discussions
Martin Aragoneses@m_aragoneses
Kandinsky was an economist before changing careers at age 30 to become a world renowned painter; his art remained highly influenced by math we use in Econ: e.g. Kakutani developed his famous Fixed Point theorem in 1941. A year later, Kandinsky painted Fixed Points. Beautiful, no?
Wassily Kandinsky @artistkandinsky
Fixed points, 1942 #vasilykandinsky #wassilykandinsky https://t.co/HPruHQvLnD
4:49 AM · Jan 19, 2021
406 Reposts · 1.92K Likes
Andrew Charles Baker@Andrew___Baker
All of these have the same TWFE DiD estimate and this is why you must always run your analysis as an event study
1:35 AM · Jan 20, 2021
23 Reposts · 237 Likes
Arindrajit Dube@arindube
@KhoaVuUmn @besttrousers Think of modern papers as inverted pyramid books. The main paper has all the key arguments and evidence. But if you want to dig deeper, you can drill down to the appendix, whose main results are (should be) summarized in the main paper.
I actually think it's a good model TBH.
5:54 AM · Jan 23, 2021
3 Reposts · 12 Likes
Ben Golub@ben_golub
Ok, my own answer to @JSEllenberg's question.
Here are some important statements that come up in economics:
"Nice estimators are consistent even in complicated models."
"Nice financial markets are informationally efficient."
1/
4:55 PM · Jan 23, 2021
5 Reposts · 61 Likes
Emily Nix@EmilyNix100
Such a great idea - many online seminar series tend to focus on big names, which I completely understand but can really crowd out junior scholars. This series is inviting early career researchers to film a short 5 minute video on their paper to be played before the talk!
Eugen Dimant @eugen_dimant
2/2
Kick-off Feb 4: @CBicchieri on 'Norm Nudging & Social Inferences'
💥ECRs, we pilot a new idea: we will feature *your paper* (on norms/behavior change) before the main talk in form of a 5 min video. Submit: https://t.co/N020QtTLA6
@Penn #EconTwitter
https://t.co/J2E81FRsVN https://t.co/8wYgnkEpWU
3:18 PM · Jan 18, 2021
14 Reposts · 58 Likes