Best of #econtwitter - Week of January 1, 2023: interesting tweets
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.
Interesting discussions

Do people become conservative with age? An update with 21 countries and 546,013 individuals.
The fascinating plot comes from @jburnmurdoch, based on the UK and US, and shows;
1. People become more right-wing with age.
2. Millennials are different.
But is this true everywhere?


Headline: We really do tend to grow more conservative as we age.
Across the West, the shift accounts for ~10 percentage points over the lifetime.
But there are differences across the generations. Millennials have trended in the opposite direction (!) so far.

^“But it is not true everywhere. Mainland Europe is quite different, for example.”

Help me out causality twitter: What is the very best example in all of medicine of an average treatment effect (ATE) estimate inferred *from observational data* that anyone reasonable confidently believes is even close to correct?
^now do econ

@KwekuOA It should just be a standard easy thing to know "what happened to the last 30 people this dept hired on TT?"

These are the stats for econ tenure track outcomes at Caltech since 2015:
- Denied tenure: 1
- Left Caltech: 2
- Tenured: 5

Andrea Matranga 🇺🇦🌻 @andreamatranga

You are being too kind. 5 years to publication means journals are massively reducing TFP of economists.
Some economist should measure the welfare effect of peer review. My prior is it is positive if time to pub were 6 mo., but very negative at eg 5 years. https://t.co/LQbl3qfReZ

James Graham @J_Meanwell

Abolish journal volumes and issues. Assign DOI and treat acceptance as rating of the paper. Forget about reformatting the draft to match journal style. Progress.

Job market tip:
“Don’t act like a grad student.”
What I mean is, don’t be asking for approval. Nobody wants to think about why you fit there. Decide you fit and tell them why. Act more like you’re already in the role you want. Sound like you already work there.
Public goods

Fairly new set of global roads data from Microsoft: 47.8 million km of roads for a huge chunk of the world (note format is tsv)
"The data is freely available for download and use under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL)."
#opendata
github.com/microsoft/Road…


I'm starting a page to highlight examples of easier-to-use versions of normally hard-to-use government datasets:


Accessing U.S. data for research just got easier
New online portal streamlines requests for massive data sets at 16 federal agencies
“What’s your favorite…”

What are your favorite papers in social economics and finance that you read this year?
Self-nominations encouraged!
Please RT. I’ll compile a list.
Ht @alexoimas

What are your favorite behavioral and experimental economics papers that you read this year?
Self-nominations are encouraged!
Plz RT. I’ll compile a list.