Best of #econtwitter - Week of January 22, 2023: paper summaries
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.
Paper summaries
Did declining religious participation in the late 1980s lead to increased deaths of despair (e.g. suicides) in the early 1990s?
A new paper out this week tackles this question. I summarize the paper and give my take below.
^“the authors analyze the repeal of blue laws (laws banning commerce, often on Sunday mornings)”
The authors provide many nice graphs to show the main effect. Let me show perhaps the most intuitive figure. Below the authors plot deaths of despair across time for 3 states that experienced a repeal of blue laws in 1985 versus control states without any law changes.
🚨 New working paper alert 🚨 That's what we do, right? The alarm?
"Comparison Shopping" with Mark Whitmeyer
Consumers are deciding between 2 products. They can gather any information at a cost. Firms set prices without knowing what the consumer learns.
briancalbrecht.com/Albrecht_Whitm…
We find that Twitter users were:
- 12% more likely to follow White vs Black students
- 21% more likely to follow students from top vs. lower-ranked univs
- 25% more likely to follow female vs male students
(by design we are NOT able to identify effects at the individual level)
^field experiment with fake accounts
2/5 The punchline: within-country differences in house prices between cities have risen much more strongly than differences in rents between cities.
In standard models changes in prices and rents should be tightly linked, but they are not. What's been going on?
^“We propose a new explanation: falling real interest rates”
🚨New paper🚨
Does offering pre-commitment (the option to save more later) always increase savings? Not necessarily...
In a new paper with @hengchen_dai @johnbeshears @katy_milkman @shlomobenartzi, we show when and why offering pre-commitment can actually reduce savings.
🧵⬇️
📢Important paper on entrepreneurship!📢
"Young firms, old capital" in JFE
Ma, Murfin & Pratt
Young firms don't enter with brand new machines, but use (cheaper) old machines bought from local large firms
Data on 1.56m transactions, 70k machine models, tracked by serial numbers
New paper! #EconTwitter
Brand new, first draft, maybe not ready to share but trying something new.
This is the most data-intensive paper I've ever written.
TLDR: air pollution from coal plants is bad for agricultural productivity and growth.
Venture capital-backed startups used to IPO but now they're being acquired.
My new paper with Bruno Pellegrino documents this secular shift and shows that serial acquirers of startups have become particularly insulated from product market competition.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
US construction productivity has FALLEN for 6 decades 📉
The technical term is a dumpster fire.
From @Austan_Goolsbee and Syverson
Replicates the seat belt paper with more data and latest methods. Find even bigger effect of seat belts on mortality. nber.org/papers/w30851
‼️ New paper alert ‼️ Was excited to have a new paper with @BilgeErten and Zhu on the effects of FDI on structural transformation + demographic change presented at the ASSAs this month + wanted to share a 🧵w/some findings #EconTwitter
Is formal separation of powers sufficient to ensure judicial independence?
No, in Brazil. Winning elections for mayor in Brazil reduce the chance of being convicted by local judges for past misconduct, possibly due to favor exchanges and career concerns.
How do SNAP benefits affect grocery prices?
A 1% rise in SNAP benefits per capita raises prices by 0.08% during the Great Recession. Marginal SNAP dollar adds +$0.7 to a recipient's consumer surplus, +$0.5 to producer surplus, and lowers each non-SNAP consumer's surplus by $0.05
My paper "Immigration and Violent Crime: Evidence from the Colombia-Venezuela Border" joint with @atribinu, is now forthcoming at the Journal of Development Economics.
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
More paper summaries
TIL profits for public firms have halved(!) since 1980 🤯
Remember, these are the same firms with supposedly skyrocketing markups.
What is going on?!
🚨 Our Altruism or Money? Reducing Teacher Sorting using Behavioral Strategies in Peru was accepted @ 𝑱𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝒐𝒇 𝑳𝒂𝒃𝒐𝒓 𝑬𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒐𝒎𝒊𝒄𝒔
A low-cost behavioral intervention at scale motivated teachers to apply to disadvantaged schools to reduce teacher sorting.
🚨NEW PAPER ALERT!! @anthlittle and I are excited to share our new working paper “Subjective and Objective Measurement of Democratic Backsliding.” 🔥Our hot take🔥: Contrary to the current narrative, we DON’T find evidence that we are in a period of global democratic decline 🧵1/
