Best of #econtwitter - Week of January 31, 2021
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.
Paper summary threads
Identification: We exploit a (fuzzy) spatial regression discontinuity (SRD) design. We compare “lucky” households that are supplied with faster broadband access to otherwise similar counterparts that were “unlucky”, supplied with slower broadband access
I'm thrilled to announce that my paper with @DavidJust1, entitled, "The Other Half: An Examination of Monthly Food Pantry Cycles in the Context of SNAP Benefits," has been published online in Applied Economics Policy and Perspectives! (1/3)
Don't know about the literature but this is very interesting pattern of patenting concentration over time. Really informative paper.
Jeffrey Lin @jeffrlin
Why do distortionary policies persist? This is an important question in pol econ. I came across this beautiful 6 page paper in the AER by @M_ttM_ and Andrea Moro.
Here is a brief thread but I won't be offended if you read the paper instead.
VARs and local projections are two of the most popular approaches to impulse response analysis in macro. We ask: What do the population versions of those two techniques (i.e., infinitely many lags on infinitely large samples) estimate? Answer: the same thing!
In line with recent evidence, we estimate large & persistent effects on asset prices and the racial unemployment gap after a 100bp expansionary monetary policy shock. 4/9
Does having women in top positions help close the gender pay gap?
This fascinating research from the US suggests the answer might be "no". They find no difference in the earnings penalty experienced by mothers whether the three top earners are all male or all female...
Dani Sandler @dhsandler
While evidence points to the displacement of workers by robots in the US, the German labour market institutions prevent automation from having similar effects.Great thread👇
Jens Suedekum @jsuedekum
A depressing new NBER working paper suggests that scheduling standardized tests when food benefits are more likely to have run out is associated with lower rates of four-year college attendance.
^some graphs here
Is #concentration rising? @AffeldtPauline, @JoannaPiechucka, #KlausGugler and I use a novel dataset containing information on over 20,000 relevant antitrust markets between 1990-2014 to assess this question: cepr.org/active/publica…. We find quite some heterogeneity. A thread 1/N
More: nominal wage stickiness during the pandemic; “statistical capacity” of nations; youth employment programs and crime; designing surveys; CBO scoring; double-robust identification in panels; sports betting in LICs; fiscal multipliers in HANK; teaching language switch in Indonesia; more on common ownership in cereal and methodology; more on folklore; price platform clauses; tariff retaliation; questioning of male vs. female presenters in seminars; GDP growth and US presidential vote share; corruption in Hungarian media; water quality and children
Minimum wage special section
.@NeumarkDN and Peter Shirley's meta-estimate of employment elasticities with respect to minimum wage, along with CBO's estimate
nber.org/system/files/w…
^Dube @ Neumark here; another useful Dube thread:
A problem w/ comparing "min wage elasticities" across studies as Neumark & Shirley's new paper does: magnitudes are is uninterpretable. Lumps elasticities on aggregate employment (e.g., Meer & West) and just low wage workers (e.g., Cengiz et al.) together.
The paper also sparked some commentary on meta-analyses in economics:
One thing I would like to see in meta-analyses: survey five other economists to rate the plausibility of the identifying assumptions in each paper, then plot point estimates against this plausibility index.
Arpit Gupta @arpitrage
^see also here
New paper by Ashenfelter and Jurajda: minimum wages mostly absorbed through output prices, little impact on store closure or K-L substitution.
dataspace.princeton.edu/bitstream/8843…
Public goods
As a beta user of this service, I can tell you: it's a game-changer. Access to all tweets back to 2006 with a 7.5M monthly limit. Great option for small-to-medium projects.
Twitter Dev @TwitterDev
Interesting discussions
Like much regulation, I fear making econ journals the data transparency enforcers has raised the cost of doing research without benefiting anyone.
It's particularly bad for young scholars without RA teams, and for people working with non-secret admin data.
Some anecdotes 🧵
^lots of comments, eg
@ben_golub @CaltechEconThry I should like to make a point at this juncture. Debrue made an embarrassing error in his first paper on existence of continuous utility functions representing preferences. Its called the Gap error and has been the subject of some literature 1/3
