Best of #econtwitter - Week of January 2, 2022 [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.
This is part one of two. Part two is here.
Paper summary threads
How are effects of online A/B tests distributed? How often are they not significant? Does achieving significance guarantee meaningful business impact?
We answer these questions in our new paper, “False Discovery in A/B Testing”, recently out in Management Science >>
First, we analyze the effects of all the A/B tests in our data. They are quite small. The median (and average) webpage variations have roughly zero effect on webpage Engagement.
But the distribution is quite long-tailed with some variations showing big effects.
>>
^data from online platform Optimizely. Implications for statistical significance bias
Entering 2022 feels like a good time to tweet a thread on a very cool paper by my wife Christina Patterson & co-auths @JADHazell, Heather Sarsons & @Bledi_Taska on the huge prevalence of national wage setting (firms setting ~same wage in all locations) drive.google.com/file/d/1_zB9hM…
Very interesting new paper from @paulkrugman on fiscal vs monetary policy to combat secular stagnation. The main tradeoff is that fiscal policy may crowd out investment, while inflation may have large social costs.
^another thread on the same paper from Luca Fornaro
Super excited to share that our paper "Capital and income inequality: an aggregate-demand complementarity", with @FlorinBilbiie and Paolo Surico, has been accepted at the 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗘𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀!
Accepted version via dkaenzig.github.io/diegokaenzig.c…
Happy New Year #EconTwitter! One thing I'm very grateful to 2021 for is that my and @ThanasisGeromi1's "Liquidity-Augmented Model" got published in @RevEconDyn.
Want a formal DSGE model where fiscal and monetary policy interact, prices are...
1/
Review of Economic Dynamics @RevEconDyn
There's an important paper on automation and inequality out today in AEJ:Macro.
It's elegant, it has kickstarted research on automation, and yet it's also under-appreciated.
So here's an appreciation thread:
There is a lot that is cool about this paper by Nygaard and Raveendranathan, but this picture is at least worth 1000 words (or at least the characters of a few Tweets).
This graph is the uninsurance rate between 1940 and 2018 in the US population.
Link:
drive.google.com/file/d/149wYkZ…
Tim Kehoe @TimTkehoe
A thread about “A/B Contracts” with @convexify. Imagine you hire salespeople every summer to go door to door selling kitchen knife sets, and you pay them a piece rate for each sale. Should you increase or decrease this piece rate? (1/14)
increasing affective polarization is highly correlated with democratic backsliding across 53 countries over 170 national elections; ideological polarization has shown no correlation
osf.io/auqz9/download
Interesting discussions
Who earned PhDs in economics in 2020? Gleanings from the NSF's Survey of Earned Doctorates brook.gs/32IGm5v via
@BrookingsInst Hutchins Center #econtwitter
^Only “12% took five years or less”
A thought about typesetting for technical papers: in the steps of a proof, a long equation may only change slightly from one line to the next. Why (other than tradition) do we not highlight these changes in color?