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

Rosa Sanchis-Guarner @RosaSanchisG

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

^“We find that moving 100 meters closer to the LE station increases student test scores by 0.122 percentile ranks.”

Anne Byrne @EconAnne

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)

Khoa Vu @KhoaVuUmn

Don't know about the literature but this is very interesting pattern of patenting concentration over time. Really informative paper.

Jeffrey Lin @jeffrlin

New survey and analysis of the evolution of the geography of innovation in the US from Andrews and Whalley. Ungated here: https://t.co/yOYJEtBoqR https://t.co/in7MMBWznM https://t.co/TueNKZLmii

Nageeb Ali @SNageebAli

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.

aeaweb.orgPersistent Distortionary Policies with Asymmetric Information(March 2006) - Why are distortionary policies used when seemingly Pareto improvements exist? According to a standard textbook argument, a Pareto improvement can be obtained by eliminating the distortions, compensating the losers with a lump sum transfer, and redistributing the gains that are left ov…

Christian Wolf @ChristianKWolf

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!

Moritz Kuhn @kuhnmo

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

Anna Stansbury @annastansbury

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

Despite this, we find no evidence that the number of female top earners at a firm has an effect on the motherhood penalty experienced by employees at the firm https://t.co/relvnFsFg3

Maria Koumenta @koumenta_m

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

Do robots destroy jobs and cause mass unemployment? No, they don’t! Happy to share that our paper “The Adjustment of Labor Markets to Robots” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the European Economic Association. Here’s a little thread about it. (1/18) https://t.co/ZFfwdBEBrD

Robert Kelchen @rkelchen

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.

nber.orgHungry for Success? SNAP Timing, High-Stakes Exam Performance, and College AttendanceFounded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

^some graphs here

Tomaso Duso @tomaso_duso

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

Arpit Gupta @arpitrage

.@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:

Arindrajit Dube @arindube

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:

Jason Abaluck @Jabaluck

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

.@NeumarkDN and Peter Shirley's meta-estimate of employment elasticities with respect to minimum wage, along with CBO's estimate https://t.co/nGrc3jTGly https://t.co/rcUhEv6cPe

^see also here

Arindrajit Dube @arindube

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

Deen Freelon @dfreelon

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

Academics are one of the biggest groups using the #TwitterAPI to research what’s happening. Their work helps make the world (& Twitter) a better place, and now more than ever, we must enable more of it. Introducing 🥁 the Academic Research product track! https://t.co/nOFiGewAV2

Interesting discussions

Paul Novosad @paulnovosad

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

Rabee Tourky @RabeeTourky

@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

Christopher A. Neilson @ChrisANeilson

Noticable buzz about the increase in exploding AP job offers. My take - this year deans are likely being extra risk averse - need profs, just can't go over budget! Sequential offers with a short fuse is one solution if really constrained to not make offers in expectation.

scott cunningham @causalinf

Professors of economics. What definition of economics do you give on day one? I usually use the lionel Robbins one about unlimited wants and limited resources with a second definition emphasizing allocations.