Best of #econtwitter - Week of January 2, 2022 [2/2]
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.
This is part two of two. Part one is here.
Paper summary threads

The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability? My JPE with @PascaliLuigi and Joram Mayshar. I consider this my most significant work in 25 years of research.

^“wheat is fascist builds state capacity”; more summary from an older thread:

As an instrument, they used the relative productivity of local cereal and tubers. Tubers are naturally suited to tropical environments. Tubers are a worse proposition in northern latitudes (darker shades of grey) and tuber societies are equatorial (red). 7/



State-building, meanwhile, took off in areas that gained new access to cereals, even outside of colonies. (I’m skeptical of the magnitude of this, there were lots of other state-building pressures they don’t control for, like the slave trade and commodity trades.) 10/

—

By exploiting the variation in policy adoption timing across states, I show that the number of women inventors rose significantly (especially in the long-run) after the adoption of independent property rights.

^a JMP

Two cool new papers on intergenerational mobility in Germany and Sweden I came across recently. The one on Germany, by Dodin, @SebastianFind, Henkel, @Dominik__Sachs and Schüle cleverly overcomes the measurement problem in 🇩🇪


Evidence is accumulating that online teaching reduces learning outcomes:
doi.org/10.1086/669930 by Figlio et al. (2013)
aeaweb.org/articles?id=10… by Alpert et al. (2016)
aeaweb.org/articles?id=10… by Bettinger et al. (2017)
doi.org/10.1093/jeea/j… by Cacault et al. (2021)
(1/3)




More: climate change and food; opioid epidemic; air quality in India; commitment savings box; wage diffs by major
Survey of economists
Special pop-up section for navel-gazing purposes:

🧵Happy New Year! Doris Geide-Stevenson & I ran a new round of the "Consensus Among [AEA] Economists" survey after the ones in 1990, 2000, & 2011. Not only do economists agree on many issues, but consensus ⬆️ on many fronts. Let's check some results! dropbox.com/s/9npyqbbidcjm… 1/12


When looking at common questions across survey rounds, 2020 exhibited a remarkable increase in the share of questions that met our 3 measures of consensus (i.e., strong consensus).
Let's have a closer look at some results for individual questions that I found interesting.
5/12

^“I do worry sometimes that this is just education polarization” says guess who, cf:

AEA members identifying as liberal outnumber conservatives by 4:1 margin
This is consistent with other data, but I think a slightly bigger gap than past surveys

Álvaro La Parra-Pérez @AlvaroLaParra

We now have an updated version of the list of "things economists agree on" (aeaweb.org/conference/202…).
Highlights:
1. 98% like floating exchange rates
2. 97% think immigration is good for the US economy
3. 95% think that tariffs are bad
1/2

4. 94% think fiscal policy can be useful as stimulus when below full employment
5. 93% want to enforce antitrust laws
6. 90% would expand the EITC
7. 86% would prefer more income equality in the US
8. 71% think that inflation is a monetary phenomenon
9. 74% believes in u*
2/2
Interesting discussions

Economic theory is full of surprising results that are easy to describe to a layperson. Thinking about upcoming teaching, some (below) came to mind.
What other ones come to mind?
[I'm abusing tweeetic license and omitting caveats needed to make all these statements correct.]
^thread, replies

My annual tradition continues -- my 10 favorite economics papers published in 2021, ordered alphabetically
[Meant to do this yesterday, but I had a paper rejected on New Year's Day -- Happy New Year! -- so I decided to deal with that instead]

Matt Notowidigdo @ProfNoto
^see also here and quote tweets there