Best of #econtwitter - Week of January 24, 2021 (1/2)
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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
Think that evolution selects for correct beliefs over mistaken beliefs? Maybe not
Jonathan “Social Distancing” Libgober @JlibDoesEcon
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
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
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.
(^note this is a correlation)
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
"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
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
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…
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?
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)
^“broadband expansion may have led steady state unemployment to fall from around 5% to 4% in Norway”
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…
Public goods
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…
🚨Curious about how to interpret regression tables? I created a guide for my undergraduate students.🤓
👉semrasevi342192471.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/guide-… 👈
#AcademicTwitter @AcademicChatter
🧵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
Econ-adjacent
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..🧵
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 — 🧵
Interesting discussions
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
All of these have the same TWFE DiD estimate and this is why you must always run your analysis as an event study
@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.
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/
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